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OUTLINES 



ME'N, WOMEN, AND THINGS. 



BY / 

MARY CLEMMER AJMES. 




NEW YORK: 
PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON. 

1873. 



?^ 10:3? 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by 

Mary Clemmeb Ames, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



RIVERSIDE, Cambridge: 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 
H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



To 

MRS. PORTUS BAXTER, 

OF VERMONT, 
IN PRECIOUS MEMORY OF ONE GONE BEFORE, 

ARE AFFECTIONA TEL Y DEDICA TED. 



CONTENTS. 



I. Arlington ij^ May 1 

II. Northern Vermont in August ... 9 

rH. Newport in September 20 

lY. Indian Summer in Virginia . ,* . , 37 

V. Charles Sumner's Home . , . . 43 

VI. Grand Duke Alexis in New York . . 56 

Vn. A Rainy Morning in the Country . . 66 

VIII. Margaret Fuller Ossoli .... 77 

IX. A French Journalist 95 

X. Fanny Fern 106 

XI. Horace Greeley and Edwin Forrest . . 116 

XII. Lola Montez 124 

XIII. Things gone by 131 

XIV. The Fallen Man 144 

XV. Physical Basis of Statesmanship . . 155 -'' 

XVI. Instinctive Philosophers and Statesmen 164 

X\T:I. Pin-money 173 

XVI n. Breadmaking 188 

XIX. Our Kitchens 200 

XX. Caste ijjt Sex 208/ 

XXI. Woman Suffrage 225 

XXII. Una and her Paupers 239 

XXIII. Let us Live 247 



OUTLINES 



OP 



ME-N, WOMEI(, Al^D THmGS. 



I. 

AELINGTON IN MAY. 

Arlington is a lovely spot. Virginia, with 
all its vaunting, can hardly boast of a fairer 
domain. From its slopes you look down upon 
the valley of the Potomac. Beyond the lordly 
river Washington stretches away to its crown- 
ing Capitol. The great dome glitters through 
the crystal-blue air, and high above it the God- 
dess of Liberty holds tutelary guard over the- 
newly consecrated land. This is the picture — 
flecked here and there with breezy fields, and 
open woods, and softly swelUng hills — which 
we see from Arhngton. As we turned into the^ 
old Alexandria road, I thought of something 
that I saw not very long ago : a letter, the last 
one written by Mary Custis from Arlington, to 
Robert E. Lee, before she became his wife. 
The letter of a happy girl to the man beloved 
1 



2 OUTLINES. 

and chosen to be the husband of her heart and 
the ruler of her life, her eventful fate has given 
to it a touching significance. It referred solely 
to their approaching marriage and future life, 
and was full of love, and hope, and religious 
faith. The young officer, stationed for the time 
at Old Point Comfort, seemed to be in posses- 
sion of only narrow quarters. Yet the heiress 
of Arhngton saw nothing formidable in this, 
and counted it no sacrifice to leave the wide 
halls of her home for the scanty conveniences of 
a miUtary fortress. " When mother tcame, 
why, they could make a bed in the sitting-room 
for her; and as for a maid, if there was no 
room, Mary Custis could do without one ! " 
Rare self-abnegation for a Virginia heiress. 
Then came pleasant gossips about the brides- 
maids and groomsmen already at Arlington, 
and maidenly fears as to how she should acquit 
herseK through the trying ceremony ; followed 
and finished with that exquisite humility of 
love which always sees in the beloved one the 
finer good, the diviner beauty, both of body 
and of spirit, which, humble-hearted, it misses 
in itself, only to recognize and worship in that 
other self who is now the counterpart and 
crown of all true existence. 

She was unworthy of such great happiness ; 



ARLINGTON IN MAY. 3 

but, because he deserved it all, the blessing of 
God would descend upon their union. Indeed, 
she felt that they could claim that benediction 
of heaven promised to those who honored and 
obeyed their parents, and sought to do the will 
of their Heavenly Father. 

On a certain day she would ride from Arhng- 
ton on horseback and meet him at Alexandria. 
Over this very road came the happy lovers. 
Far and fair on every side stretched the sunny 
lands which were their proud inheritance. Ar- 
lington House opened wide its doors to these 
beloved children. Its patriarchal trees waved 
their summer welcomes. Slaves came thronging 
from their cottages to greet their " dear Miss 
Mary " and her handsome young husband. 

What a summer day for these joyous hearts ! 
Ineffable as its sunshine shone the promise of 
their future. It was well for Mary Custis that 
to her was given no " second sight " to divine 
the sorrow of a far-off morning. Well that 
those soft eyes, looking on, did not see these 
gay old gardens and violet slopes sown thick 
with human bones, and turfed with ten thou- 
sand human graves ! When she wrote this let- 
ter, in the sweet fullness of her heart, it was- 
well she could not know that when her hair was- 
white, and her heart old with many sorrows, a 



4 OUTLINES. 

soldier would find this letter amid the treasures 
left in the home from which she was banished 
— banished because the husband for whose sake 
she dreamed all gracious fortune would come 
was an armed traitor^ fighting against the gov- 
ernment which had covered him with honor. 
She was innocent and lovely ; but the innocence 
and loveliness of one could not avert the inevi- 
table punishment of generations of wrong. This 
letter, full of all girlish gentleness and love, 
draws us in sympathy toward her who wrote 
it ; yet we look on the graves of the dead, 
beneath the protecting trees of Arlington, and 
say. Far be that day when to Mary Custis, or 
to her children, shall be given back the home 
of her fathers ! 

" It would be enough to make these dry 
bones stir and come forth, armed with new 
life," said a gentle voice at my side this morn- 
ing, in the Soldiers' Cemetery at Arlington. 
We stood on those wooded swards, looking down 
through the widening vistas, and on every side, 
reaching far out till they seemed to meet the 
sky, were the graves of our soldiers. No hu- 
man tongue, though touched with the inspira- 
tion of angels, no word of man could move 
with the eloquence of this silence. From the 
fields of Manassas and Bull Run, from the 



i 



ARLINGTON IN MAY. 5 

thickets of the Wilderness, from the waste places 
of Virginia, day by day, the nation gathered her 
darlings, and laid them down to sleep upon 
these peaceful slopes. Thousands are buried 
here. Hundreds of thousands more, from the 
Heights of Arlington to the bayous of the Gulf, 
sow all the land — the soldiers who fought and 
perished for liberty. Every grave is turfed, 
and has at its head a white board, telling of 
the " unknown," or giving the name, regiment, 
and time of death of the soldier who sleeps 
below. At the entrance of the avenues are 
tablets, bearing inscriptions such as these : 

^' On fame's eternal camping-ground, 
Our silent tents are spread, 
And glory guards with solemn round 
The bivouac of the dead." 

** Whether on the tented field or in the battle's van, 
The grandest place for man to die 
Is where he dies for man ! ^' 

I never saw Arlington so silent and lonely 
before. It is no longer the headquarters of 
troops, but a silent temple amid the vast city of 
the slain. The hush of the grave has touched 
its threshold. The sanctity of the dead seems 
to pervade its silence. The lower apartments 
^re all open to visitors, who walk about with 
t^oftened voice and step. The rooms look old 



6 OUTLINES, 

and worn, but are in no way defaced. Old 
paintings still look down from the walls of the 
drawing-room, and in the hbrary mouldy books 
are securely locked away in antique cases. The 
stag's head and antlers still deck the grand old 
hall, and a sideboard remains to tell of ancient 
cheer. Yet everywhere amid these reKcs of 
family life, with their stories of a happy and 
illustrious past, hang the records of our lost, 
reminding us only of the lowly yet illustrious 
dead. Beautiful Arlington, looking down upon 
a landscape soft as Italy, may you never again 
be the home of the living ! The birds come 
earliest to your branches, and on your tender 
slopes the sweet arbutus first wakes to life. In 
your mossy moulds the violet distils its earliest 
fragrance, and here, when Summer seems gone 
from the world, she leans back to your sheltered 
hills to say good-by. There can be no kindlier 
spot in which the soldiers of our love may rest 
after the march and the battle. There can be no 
fitter place in all the world, than the domain of 
the man who used such power to destroy her, for 
the mausoleum of the nation. 

Before me lies my first spray of traihng ar- 
butus from the woods of Arlington. In South- 
ern airs it caught its pinky bloom, filled its cells 
with honey, and distilled its subtle fragrance: l 



ARLINGTON IN MAY. 7 

yet it is twin to the arbutus tliat I used to find 
amid the lush leaves and wonderful mosses of 
the woods of New York. Don't make me sen- 
timental, Arbutus, with your memories of earlier 
Springs, from whose freshness neither time nor 
care had brushed the first dew of youth ! You 
are the very same. Arbutus ; you haven't grown 
old a bit. And Spring comes back, fair and 
young as ever. Time does not touch her bloom, 
nor palsy her pulses. The same ecstasy thrills 
in her veins, and in her myriad of delicate nerves 
young life is all astir. 

Her loving angels are abroad. They tint the 
sky, soften the air, sail in the serene clouds. 
They have touched the buds, wakened the blos- 
soms, they renew the life of the living ; drop 
their mantles to cover the graves of our dead. 
How is it. Arbutus ? You have not changed, 
neither has the Spring. We gaze on you with 
the same eyes, caress you with the same fingers ; 
yet we, we are not quite the same. Each suc- 
ceeding Spring seems to touch a deeper Spring 
of Ufe within us. Every time we welcome May 
again we feel that we have gone down deeper 
into the mystery of Being. Our years need 
not be many to make us feel that they have 
robbed us. They have heaped up treasure for 
\ s. They have given us place and power, love 



8 OUTLINES. 

and happiness. Yet they have buried our dead 
and estranged our living. They now make us 
feel what we have missed. They have taken 
from us that which they can never restore — the 
freshness, the promise of the beautiful begin- 
ning ! Thus my Arbutus saith ? You sin as 
you write, says Arbutus. My tender tints, my 
spiritual perfume, renewed in primal freshness 
Spring after Spring, are the promise of the 
Everlasting Spring. 



II. 

NORTHERN VERMONT IN AUGUST. 

I FEAR I have nothing to say that you "will in 
the least care to hear. I am just as fond of you 
as ever, dear souls ; only I must own I am dis- 
inclined even to tell you so. Do you know how 
blessed it is to be quiet ? How much more 
blessed it is to feel that you may be quiet in 
peace, that no mortal living has any right to 
demand that you shall break your peace by one 
compulsory word or sound ? The latter bless- 
edness I know not. I am at rest because I am 
a runaway. I have run away from the world. 
I am at peace because I will not be defrauded 
of it utterly by the wear and tear, the fret and 
hurry, the work and pain of mortal years lived 
in the trampling thoroughfares of men. Here 
am I watching a humming-bird oiling its gauzy 
wings in a spruce tree beside my window (such 
a charming sight), with not a word to utter 
of the slightest importance whatever. Not a 
thousand miles distant there is a little room 
whose desk and books and pictures and lounge 



10 OUTLINES. 

even are full of serious meditation on human 
life and all that concerns it. Life has no phase 
of joy or pain, of thought, action, or experience, 
which has not been faithfully and often sor- 
rowfully studied in that little room. 

'' The low sad music of humanity," the re- 
frain of toiUng millions of men and women, at 
times seemed too heart-breaking to be borne ; I 
the problems of human destiny too difficult and 
conflicting to be solved by mortal mind ; the 
very comprehension of human life more than 
one could bear, sometimes, in that little room. 
When I shut its door I shut human life — at 
least, the ceaseless consideration of it — behind 
me. If this could never be done, how could 
one live ? From this aerie in the mountains 
how can I reach down, take up its tangled 
thread, draw it into where I am, and weave it 
into the harmonies of thought ? I am not here 
to think, but to rest ; here to grow strong by 
fresh contact with the life-giving earth, to feed 
the very pulsations of hf e from the deep breast 
of the mighty mother. 

I essay to speak ; but can think of nothing 
but the brooks that I have waded and followed 
— the sliining brooks, lined with moss, fringed 
with ferns, arched with cedars, spruce, and pines, 
thronged with trout, beautiful as flowers. I 



NORTHERN VERMONT IN AUGUST. 11 

can see nothing but mountain tops and sunsets, 
and many lakes, glittering between the hills. 
Resplendent are these all to see ; but oh ! how 
poor they show through the finest glitter of 
words. Then it is heavenly to ''loaf " ; but it 
is not much to tell about. If it is loafing to 
bask on a bank, in the full blaze of the sun, 
through an entire August afternoon, making in- 
timate acquaintance with bugs and " things " 
— the cunning workers of the ground and the 
murmuring nations of the air — then am I a 
bom loafer. I spend an afternoon in this fash- 
ion whenever I can possibly get the chance. 
All the Aunt Jemimas in creation might croak 
around me about my waste of time, all the 
same I'd cultivate my bugs. Let the sim burn 
and tan me ; I " loaf " on in imperturbability 
of soul. Pretty field-bugs, that live in the 
grass, are such delightful society, compared 
with tedious people. If you have never found 
this out, do try. My closest companions dur- 
ing the last month have been grasshoppers. 
They will not leave or forsake me. There is 
one actually hopping on my paper at this mo- 
ment. The amount of time I spend in mend- 
ing their legs and helping them out of tight 
places should insure me their gratitude as the 
benefactor of their race. '' Grasshopper, grass- 



12 OUTLINES. 

Iiopper, give me some molasses ! " is the cliild's 
cry. Now, unasked, tliey give me many other 
tilings — analogies among the rest. I sat down 
in an open field, the other day, amid grasshop- 
pers as many as there are men in a State. The 
air was full of them, the brook was full of them, 
the grass was full of them, and by my side on 
an immense flat stone they were holding a mass 
meeting. They sat in rows, closer than the men 
in the Philadelphia Republican Convention. It 
was a serene looking assembly in mass. But 
rery soon it gave evidence that it was not with- 
out its excited individuals, its " disaffected mem- 
bers." In sooth, it was not without its '' bolt- 
ers." My ! When everything seemed to be 
progressing peacefully, up would hop a bolter 
and jump straight into the brook. Mad little 
bolter, he slid along smoothly enough for a min- 
ute ; then whirls, eddies, rocks were his. On 
he dashed to his fate, straight into the mouth 
of a big trout. 

Lake Memphremagog is set like a mirror be- 
tween the mountains of Canada and Vermont. 
It has none of the warm sylvan beauty of Lake 
George, or of the idylhc loveliness of Lake 
Willoughby ; but it has a majestic, masculine 
splendor AvhoUy its own. When the September 
sun drops low, and cold, steely shadows creep 



NORTHERN VERMONT IN AUGUST. 13 

. along the sides of the girdling evergreen moun- 
tains, its deep, inky waters and lovely but 
lonely shores take on the look of the lochs of 
Scotland — blue, and cold, and solemn, like 
them. Under the frowning Owl's Head you 
feel as if you were sailing on Loch Achray and 
looking up at Ben Venue. But it has blither 
phases — long, bright vistas, filled with majesty 
and splendor, touched here and there with tender 
beauty. How I wish that I could transcribe them 
for you, so that the dead type might glow if but 
ever so faintly, with a reflection of the inexpress- 
ible beauty of God's world. But I am more and 
more impressed with the impotency of words in 
reproducing Nature, either in form or color. 

" Why do we ever attempt it ? " I ask a 
friend. " A painter cannot see a sight like this 
without the passionate desire to reproduce it in 
form or tint ; or a writer, without the attempt 
to portray it in words. Both know before they 
begin that the best that they can do will be but 
a mockery of the reality. What makes them 
attempt it ? " 

" The instinctive desire to share it with 
others," was the answer. 

The most attractive abode on the lake is that 
of Sir Hugh Alan, M. P. This is a s\:ory-and- 
a-half white cottage, standing on a hill, in a 



14 OUTLINES. 

grove of white silver poplars, with the British 
flag waving proudly from its summit. This 
cottage, low and small, is nevertheless sup- 
ported in true English state. When Sir Hugh, 
with his guest. Lord Lismeth, and a retinue of 
gay ladies, attend the little wooden church in 
the sleepy hamlet of Georgetown, dreaming a 
few miles further on, the fact is chronicled in 
the Stanstead newspaper with all the solemn 
empressement with which a sneeze of England's 
queen is recorded in the " Court Journal." Sir 
Hugh can go to church in his yacht. This lit- 
tle bantam steamer is the only lively thing on 
the lake. Compared with the graceful yachts 
which float in Newport Harbor, it is what a 
quacking duck is to a sailing swan. It quacks 
and waddles ; but it waddles well. 

Midway up the lake, on the Canada side, 
Georgetown clings to the shore, a barren, 
wooden, treeless little hamlet. . At the end of it 
Magog — wooden, barren, and treeless, also, on 
a larger scale — waits the coming of the " Lady 
of the Lake," the only event of its Summer and 
early Autumn day. In Winter its days have no 
events. Here Mount Orford, the highest moim- 
tain in Canada, holds guard. And, while the 
boat turns, gazing back along the line of gird- 
ling mountains, through the vistas of embow- 



NORTHERN VERMONT IN AUGUST. 15 

ered islands, which dot with gleaming emerald 
the sapphire of the lake, we see the towering 
and cloven notch of mountains in which shines 
that star of lakes. Lake Willoughby. The soil 
on the Vermont shore of the lake seems to be 
much softer, warmer, and richer than on the 
Canada side ; it has none of the blue, stony look 
of its precipitous banks, and this must account 
for the massy luxuriance of the foliage which 
covers its mountain sides, and crowns their sum- 
mits, and curtains with the brilliant green of veil- 
ing vines the gray old bowlders which crowd the 
shore. The sun drops behind Orford a globe of 
scarlet, and the old mountain grows very purple 
in the face, and the top of his crown is edged with 
fire. We like his looks, which are somewhat ex- 
citing ; but the boat swings round and shuts him 
from sight. Here is old " Sugar Loaf." Every 
land that has a mountain at all is sure to have 
a Sugar Loaf ; but not every one beside one 
lake holds another on the top of his head. 
That is what this Mountain Loaf does. High 
above the rich cedars which skirt its sides, on 
its very summit, a tranquil lake holds up its 
mirror to the skies. The country folk call it 
Concert Pond, prized by fishermen in proportion 
to its difficulty of access, and to the choice qual 
ity of its speckled trout. We pass Owl's Head, 



16 OUTLINES, 

beloved of mountains, to find the pretty White 
Mountain House at its base deserted, shut up, 
save when visited by picnic parties. Inaccessi- 
ble by road, and visited but by a single boat, its 
actual loneliness and isolation have proved to 
be too great for the average summer tourists. 
Twilight on the waters deepens into the early 
September night. The boat darts through the 
darkness, in and out among the islands ; the 
fishermen's huts fade out of sight on the shores ; 
the shores merge into one dim and misty mass ; 
Jay Peak is lost in the darkness of the skies ; 
the little boy on my lap grows cold and still, 
then with a quivering sigh asks, " Where the 
big boat is going to, and if we will ever get 
home." And when, at last, it touches Newport 
pier, and I look back upon the dark water, shut 
within the imprisoning mountains, I am surer 
than ever that even in the sunshine Memphre- 
magog, if one of the most beautiful, is also one 
of the most solitary of lakes. 

Borne by loving arms Alice Cary was brought 
to this lovely lake-land during the last August 
of her life. From this bay-window she looked 
through a vista of maples out upon a broad ex- 
panse of meadow-lawn, whose velvet turf is of 
the most vivid malachite green, softened on its 
further edge by a grove wherein the shades of 



NORTHERN VERMONT IN AUGUST. 17 

spruce and pine, elm and maple, contrast and 
blend. Beyond these woods Lake Memphre- 
magog sets its glittering shield between the 
hiUs. On its farther side green mountains arise 
tiU they hold the white clouds on their heads. 
Below, Jay Peak stands over four thousand feet 
above the sea, while above, Owl's Head soars 
over three thousand, covered with forest to its 
summit. It is a picture fit for Paradise. Yet 
it is but one glimpse amid many, of the in- 
expressible beauty of this lake and mountain 
country of the North. She, sitting here, looked 
out upon this consummate scene ; looked with 
her tender, steadfast eyes, across these emerald 
meadows, to the lake shining upon her through 
the opening hills, to the mountains, smiling 
down on her from the distant heaven, their 
keen amethyst notching the deep, deep blue of 
a cloudless sky. The splendor of this northern 
world fell upon her like a new divine revela- 
tion. The tonic in its atmosphere touched her 
feeble pulses ; the peace brooding in its still- 
ness penetrated her aching brain with the 
promise of a new life. Without, the world 
was full of tranquillity ; within, it was full of 
affection and the words of loving kindness. 
Then she wondered (and her wonder was sad 
with a hopeless regret) why Summer after Sum- 



18 OUTLINES. 

mer, she had lingered in her city home, till the 
crash and roar of the streets, coming through 
her open windows, had filled body and brain 
with torture. 

'' How blind I was," she exclaimed. " I said 
that I could not take the time from my work ; 
and now life has neither time nor work left for 
me. How much more, how much better I 
could have worked had I rested. If I am 
spared, how differently I will do. I will come 
here every Summer and ZiV^." 

Alas! before another Summer, the winter 
snow wrapped her forever from the earthly 
sight of this unutterable beauty. 

Hers, from the beginning, was the fatal mistake 
of so many brain-workers — that all time given 
to refreshment and rest is so much taken from 
the results of labor ; forgetting, or not realizing, 
that the finer the instrument, the more fatal the 
effects of undue strain, the more imperative the 
necessity of avoiding over-wear and the per- 
petual jar of discordant conditions ; forgetting, 
also, that the rarest flowering of the brain has 
its root in silence, and beauty, and rest. 

Here in this window, whither, wasted and 
suffering, she had been borne, she wrote her 
" InvaUd's Plea " : — 

" Summer ! my beautiful, beautiful Summer, 
I look in thy face and I long so to live ; 



NORTHERN VERMONT IN AUGUST. 19 

But, ah ! hast thou room for an idle new-comer, 
With all things to take and with nothing to give ? 

" With all things to take of thy dear loving-kindness, 
The wine of thy sunshine, the dew of thy air ; 
And with nothing to give but the deafness and blindness 
Begot in the depths of an utter despair ? 

"The little green grasshopper, weak as we deem her, 
Chirps day in and out for the sweet right to live ; 
And canst thou, O Summer ! make room for a dreamer, 
With all things to take and with nothing to give ? 

" Room only to wrap her hot cheek m thy shadows, 
And all on thy daisy-fringed pillow to lie, 
And dream of the gates of the glorious meadows, 
Where never a rose of the roses shall die ? '* 



III. 

NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER. 

I HAVE reached " the land where it is always 
afternoon." Even when the morning sunshine 
sphnters on the keen-blue waves of the bay, and 
its expanse is full of motion and sound, there is 
a quality in the atmosphere, a softness in its 
light which falls upon you and pervades you 
like the tranquillity of evening. It is born of 
tempered elements. I cannot tell you what it 
is ; but it is full of rest. It is not wonderful 
that this is named the Isle of Peace, or that 
tired people like to come here. As I take my 
morning air-bath on this little family pier, I find 
a fascination in these waters that will not let 
me go. It soothes brain and nerves. It silences 
the rush and roar of the great, hurrying world. 
It says : " All things have rest from weariness. 
All things have rest ; why should you toil 
alone ? " I conclude that I won't. The truth 
is, I can't. The result is, the mail closes, the 
boat departs, and the light of heaven, the voices 
of earth, the mesmerism of the waves, the pie- 



NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER. 21 

tures of human life, all thronging together void 
and voiceless in the mind, have refused to take 
on palpable shapes, and have disdained the fee- 
ble offer of a stubby little pen to reveal them. 
I'd send you the crown of the morning, if I could 
An hour ago it looked like a storm, and the wind 
blew perversely. It was only a make-believe of 
the Nereids. They are busy now lifting up the 
steely fog that covered the bay like a shield ; 
and, as its edges break and curl and fly away to 
the sun, they glitter like shreds of silver. Un- 
derneath spreads the bay, a translucent sapphire. 
In the bay float the jelly-fish — tremulous, 
gleaming jewels. On the waves the fishing- 
punts are putting out for their heavy shoals. 
The bay-skiffs are all on the wing, darting from 
the little household piers and dancing away for 
a swing in the wake of some stately steamboat. 
Row-boats, painted bright blue and red and 
yellow, ai'e darting about in every direction, 
full of boys and girls, whose happy voices come 
back to us across the waters. 

Down the harbor a little way the idle yachts 
he dreaming with the sleeping gales, before they 
begins their mid-day race. Beyond, past old 
Fort Louis, a great school-ship from New York 
has cast anchor. What a sight it is — the hun- 
dreds of boys clinging like bees to its mighty 






22 OUTLINES. 



yards. High up in the bhie air, they look no 
bigger than bees ; and I watch them dropping, 
dropping like spiders down their ropy stairs. 
Now four long black boats are dropped down 
the ship's sides to the water. Now they are 
filled with boys, and now they scull across the 
bay for a race ; while a thousand boys on the 
ship fill the air with their shouts and hurrahs. 
Away out to the ocean these bright waters are 
quick with human life. But human life upon 
the wayes is not the noisy and tiresome thing 
that it is upon the streets. The very motion — 
clear, swift, and silent — is full of repose. It 
reminds me of delicious Venice, that I never 
saw. "What would be these primeval elements 
alone, without the human presence, that loves 
and suffers, rejoices and sins ? Midw^ay in the 
bay hes the green island of Canonicut. I see a 
church-spire, and clustering farm-houses, and 
sunshiny meadows, and cattle grazing down to 
the very shore. Below, the stone ramparts of 
Fort Adams, with their mounted guns, rise from 
the water ; and nearer Fort Louis lifts its gray 
old head above the soft, purple " Dumpling " 
hills. So perfect a picture of it as Higginson 
has given us in '' Malbone " can never be made 
again. He says : ''As you stand upon the 
crumbKng parapet of old Fort Louis, you feel 



NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER. 23 

yourself poised in middle air ; the sea-birds 
soar and swoop around you ; the white vessels 
come and go ; the water is around you on all 
sides but one, and spreads in pale-blue beauty 
up the lovely bay, or in deeper tints southward 
toward the horizon-lines. I know of no ruin in 
America which Nature has so resumed ; it seems 
a part of the original rock ; you cannot imagine 
it away." 

It is a single low tower, shaped like the tomb 
of Csecilia Metella. But its stately position 
makes it rank with the vast sisterhood of wave- 
washed strongholds. It might be King Arthur's 
Cornish Tyntagel ; it might be " the teocallis 
tower of Tuloom." The pretty Mermaid car- 
ried us over to it the other day — a perfect day. 
She bore us into a moss-covered cove, and we 
climbed the slippery rocks, led by a maid with 
flowing hair and a scarlet petticoat. How gay 
and picturesque she was against the gray old 
summit, as she looked back and called us on ! 
We sat down at last upon the broken parapet, 
high above the water — a little company, each 
of whom sent " long, long thoughts " of his and 
her own silently out to the questioning waters. 
We were enveloped in the marvelous atmos- 
phere (fine, soft, sun-suffused, yet exhilarating) 
which has made the climate of Newport famous 



24 OUTLINES. 

for centuries. Across the bay, Newport soared 
from shore to hill, lovely as that enchanted City 
of the Sea portrayed in " Counterparts." At 
either end of the islands far-away lawns run 
from villa and chalet down to the bay, with 
white yachts tossing by the pretty piers at their 
feet. Just below us a pleasure-boat, filled with 
a gay party, was running in and out among the 
rocky islands and coves of the " Dumplings." 
Before us a French corvette was lying in the 
stream, its tri-color hanging disconsolate in the 
still air, and its Gallic hands busy at work mak- 
ing haste to leave an unfriendly port. On the 
other side of us, the sheep were grazing on the 
rugged slopes of Canonicut. Within the fort 
Nature's wild blooms covered with grace the 
debris at our feet. Roving bees hummed to us 
with assiduous attempts at more intimate ac- 
quaintance. Crickets trilled their slender horns 
in the waving grasses, while all around us the 
golden-rod on the crumbling bastions waved its 
yellow sceptre and proclaimed to us that the 
conquering Autumn had come, and taken captive 
the Isle of Peace, no less than the lanes and 
woods at home. 

Ah, my dears, it is so hard to work here — 
so very hard. I try ; but every day some lovely 
gust of human kindness swoops me up and 



NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER, 25 

sweeps me away. Again the mail closes, the 
boat goes, and — and you know the rest. 

Let me think, and see if I can tell you a few 
of the lovely things that have happened since I 
stopped up yonder ; but, if I were to take up 
again every sunny thread that I dropped, I 
couldn't weave them into a picture at all. 

There was the out-door lunch-party at Mrs. 
Julia Ward Howe's country home, six miles 
away. It was all that a lunch-party could be 
on the fairest of August days, under the trees, 
with a ruined mill at the foot of the hill ; and 
handsome men and beautiful women and flower- 
like girls basking on the grass ; and the most 
genial of '' high-up " philosophical doctors from 
Boston to hold them in a mild degree of awe, 
and to preserve them from degenerating into too 
absolute mutual admiration ; and with a host- 
ess to whom '' Kant " is " light reading " and 
the Sanskrit a pastime, dispensing chowder with 
lavish ladle. I bear witness that she did it grace- 
fully, generously, with those beautiful hands, 
and without a hint of ink or of '' Moral Trigo- 
nometry." Mrs. Howe is attractive anywhere. 
Even on the platform she appears with a shy, 
half-deprecating, half-bewildered air, as if she 
herself could not quite make out why she was 
there \ but nowhere else does she appear to 



26 OUTLINES. 

such absolute adyantage as she does when dis- 
pensing hospitality to her friends, in her own 
demesne, in the midst of her young daughters, 
each one of whom is a perfect wild-rose in her 
fresh, girlish grace. 

I will here ask IVIrs. Howe why, instead of 
doling out her essays to scanty audiences, she 
does not set them within book-covers and give 
them to the world ? They belong to American 
literature, and ought to take their place in it. 
Nothing to compare with them in scholarship 
and philosophical thought has been produced by 
any American woman except Margaret Fuller. 
At present the highest feminine gifts in this 
land, as well as much of the mascuUne, through 
the exigent demands of daily life and the curse 
of the want of money, are devoured by that in- 
satiable Moloch, the Press, who still cries for 
more, but makes no record of the untold treasure 
which he devours. How many grandly-endowed . 
women sacrifice the rich vitality of their heart 
and brain to this monster, day by day ; yet they 
must pass and leave no enduring trace in the 
world of art of all that they have thought, felt, 
suffered, and given to their race. With all her 
mental and spiritual wealth, no American wo- 
man to-day is giving anything that will long en- 
dure to the literature of her country. Thus, if 



NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER. 27 

there is one among us who can embody for the 
world the best results of leisure, of culture, of 
comprehensive thoiight, and of rarest woman- 
hood, let us have it. 

How I wish that I could transcribe for you 
the splendor of "the Cliffs." But in these Sep- 
tember days there hovers a light over sea and 
shore which cannot be caught and imprisoned 
in words. Wordsworth would not have sung of 
" the light that never was on sea or land " had 
he gazed out over this opaline ocean, over these 
flickering shores, which in the same moment 
concentrate and radiate the loveliest of unim- 
agined, indescribable hues. The beach, two 
weeks ago crowded with equipages and gay 
people, the surf, alive with hundreds of shout- 
ing and laughing bathers, are empty and for- 
saken. The gale swept away the long line of 
bathing-houses ; the pie and candy man has 
gone to assist elsewhere in the destruction of 
the human teeth and stomach ; but " the 
Cliffs ! " — never in the July heats was their 
beauty so absolute as in the perfect sunshine 
under the perfect heaven of this September 
morning ! Yonder, amid the abundant grass, 
the peaceful cattle graze ; yonder a maple 
beckons us toward it with a scarlet hand : 
yonder wide beeches and elms spread out green 



28 OUTLINES, 

tents under which we may rest. Amid these, 
its face toward the sea, looks forth a home so 
harmonious in outline, so poetical in aspect, 
that it is hard to realize that the trail of death 
and sorrow could ever pass through it, or that 
those who inhabit it could ever be tired or sorry, 
sick or lonesome, as at some time every mortal 
who carries the burden of this human life must 
be. Past hundreds of such homes, on and on 
through the green grass, for miles winds the 
narrow path of " the Cliffs." The absolute peace 
of the green earth and its homes on one side ; 
ragged rocks, evermore the ocean on the other. 
What stories you would tell, little path, if you 
only could ! What vows, what love you have 
listened to, perhaps by those who uttered them 
so long ago broken or outlived ! What beauty 
you have seen, what purity, what sin ! What 
human want, and loneliness, and sorrow, and 
joy have told their stories to you ! At the boat- 
house, over two miles from its beginning, the 
path of "the Cliffs " ends. Here, above the shel- 
tered cove where the little boats are chained to 
the rocks, looking toward Brenton's Reef, where 
the lightship tosses through the nights and days, 
you may sit down, and with your gaze try to 
follow the ocean out to where it meets the hori- 
zon. To do this is to relinquish yourself to its 



NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER, 29 

spell, to be magnetized by its might. It draws 
you outward into its infinity. You catch a 
ghmpse of your own eternity. " Long, long 
thoughts " are these which leave your soul to 
travel out across its immense reaches of ever- 
shifting space. No narrow street, no imprison- 
ing walls limit or restrict your mind as it goes 
on to the eternities. You are the same being 
that you were yesterday in the stifling and 
crowded city — the one who then felt so inade- 
quate to live ; the one to whom life, with its 
penalties, its losses, its pain, seemed so much 
more than you could bear. How feeble seemed 
your hold on human love, on thought, on spirit- 
ual faith ! You are the very one — and now ! 
How certain you are of everything sweetest, 
truest, and best. Already you have passed 
through " the sea change into something rich 
and strange." You sat down beside it, weary 
in body, weary in heart ; and unaware you 
have abeady drawn into your veins something 
of its inexhaustible life. This is one talisman 
of the ocean, its boundless energy. Who can 
approach its waves and not feel it and receive 
it ! It electrifies you forever with its buoyancy 
of life. Ages of storms camiot make it old. 
After every tempest, it comes back and touches 
your pulses and washes your feet with the smile 



30 OUTLINES, 

of irrepressible youtli. Yet its very waves, as 
they break before you, have something eternal 
in their call. As you follow them, how sure you 
feel that there is that in you which can never 
end. How sure that the love and devotion of 
your throbbing heart will survive when that 
heart is still. How sure that the beings best 
beloved — marred now by the infirmities of the 
body and of the mind — will yet be given to 
you some day redeemed and glorified and pure. 
To those who seek it, there is a charm in 
Newport beyond its fashion. The Ocean House 
is closed. The gay pagoda, where the band 
played a week ago, is silent. The great halls 
and piazzas, then thronged with gay prome- 
naders, are shut and deserted. No six-in-hand 
now dashes along Bellevue. The Turk, with 
his toys from Constantinople, has gone ; the 
fashion shops have hurried back to Broadway ; 
but Newport is lovelier far than when all the 
denizens of Babylon were here. The cottagers 
remain ; and the cottages, their flowers, their vel- 
vet lawns, their hammocks swinging toward the 
sea. Redwood Library — that perfect lijou of a 
library — is still here, and more enticing than 
ever. One may sit in an easy-chair and read al- 
most any newspaper or review ad libitum. You 
may look at the " Dying Tecumseh ; " or if you 



NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER. 31 

don't want to, at " Venus of Milo " and " Apollo 
Belyidere." The fashion has gone ; but the ocean 
remains, and the perfect days. There is a softer 
iterance in its call than ever came to us in Sum- 
mer. A light rests upon its waves and on its 
shores which no language can interpret or trans- 
figure. Along the roadside crowds of asters 
look up at us through their purple eyes, while 
all around them every knoll and meadow flames 
with golden-rod. In the tree-tops the miracles 
of color have begun. Autumn, in her first 
ecstasy, has decked herself as for a carnival in 
yellow and scarlet. From its floods the Island 
has emerged as radiantly green as when June 
was born. All around it run the opal lines of 
the ocean ; all over it bends the intense blue of 
the heavens, flecked with the ever-changing 
splendor of the sailing clouds. Within, en- 
throned are these superlative days, " Mediter- 
ranean days," whose golden airs flow over you 
and through you, full of the softness, without 
the languor of the South. Here by my open 
window, looking over Narragansett Bay to the 
ruined forts which Higginson has so inimitably 
portrayed, I am reading " Malbone." I should 
never have read it if I had not come to New- 
port. For, dipping into it in the '' Atlantic " one 
day, I touched Malbone and recoiled. I have a 



82 OUTLINES. 

constitutional hatred of a masculine Mormon. If 
I had my way, there is not a willful, intelligent 
man-Mormon in this land that should exist in it 
a moment longer than it would take to drive him 
out of it. But the Mormon whom I especially 
detest flourishes outside of Utah, makes mischief 
and havoc far from the walls of Salt Lake City. 
He is especially detestable because, besides be- 
ing a Mormon, he is a hypocrite. A Mormon 
in practice, he yet pretends to be something else 
and better. Malbone is a constitutional Mor- 
mon. Nothing but laziness and the laws could 
keep him from having a harem fuller than the 
Sultan's. Missing this, he would console him- 
self by prowling into other folds, and none 
could be too sacred for him to invade. No 
noble work or ambition absorbs his manhood. 
All the subtlety of his intellect, all the graces 
of his person, are valuable to him only as they 
enable him to manipulate the hearts of women ; 
and the sole study and profession of his life is 
to make all women of any charm his slaves. If 
any woman on earth is unfortunate, it is she 
who loves with a woman's pure, sole love suclH 
a man — a man who loves (?) her only while he 
sees her, and forgets her altogether while kissing 
the next woman that he meets. This is Mal- 
bone, altogether contemptible from beginning to 



NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER, 33 

end. One is thankful that his victims are por- 
trayed in such pale water-colors that one can 
suffer less for them than if they were living 
women, embodying in life-force their agony and 
wrong. ''Malbone" and "Aunt Jane" are 
real — the only vitalized characters in the book. 
In reading it, one feels certain that the man 
who wrote it ought to and can write a vastly 
better one ; that where it is thin and weak it is 
so through no paucity of material, but through 
the hesitation of the author to use the material 
that he had. It is written in delicious English. . 
Its words are pure and limpid as this Newport 
air. Its Proem is perfect. And in a hundred 
exquisite touches it reveals and portrays the 
varied loveliness of this enchanting place with 
a sympathy and charm which has never been 
surpassed. Opposite is the old " Hmiter 
House," in which its scenes were placed ; a 
noble old house, looking out through its trees 
with wide-open doors, as if it had no secrets to 
hide. All Summer it has been filled with 
boarders — mothers and their children. Its 
great hall runs straight through the middle, and 
its front-door and back-door stand wide open 
from morning till night. I look through it 
now, away out to the bay. Any of us and 
all of us race through it, down to the little 



34 OUTLINES, 

pier behind the house* After reading Higgin- 
son's poetic description of this old colonial man- 
sion, I ran across the street and studied it — 
its carved mahogany staircase ; the pineapple 
above its back-door ; the dumpy cherubs on its 
parlor wainscot, which, by the way, some bar- 
barian has painted white ; even the spiral 
stairs up which poor little Emilia is supposed 
to have crept to the handsome but good-for- 
nothing Turk in the attic. Now they are very 
honest-looking stairs, without the suggestion of 
secrecy ; their doors, opening on every hall, 
matter of fact white doors, which look as if 
they never could have shut in either tragedy 
or shame. Colonel Higginson lives a few streets 
back from the bay, in a cottage ornSe^ amid 
flowering baskets, trees and vines, books and 
pictures, as a poet should. The master of a per- 
fect style, if he does not break his power on too 
small matters, and waste it in petty punctilios, 
he ought to give us the best American novel 
since the days of Hawthorne. 

It is Saturday, September 3, and the event 
not only of the season of 1870, but of years, has 
come to Newport. The Spouting Rock is send- 
ing up water in cataracts, and a great storm at 
sea has come up to the shores. All Newport 
is at the ocean. For miles the ocean-road is 



NEWPORT IN SEPTEMBER. 35 

thronged with equipages. Gentlemen and ladies 
scale the cliffs on horseback, while thousands 
stand and sit upon the rocks, silent with awe. 
The sky is steely gray. The clouds hang low 
and cold, rushing athwart and repelling each 
other. The waves rise, roar, strike, and resist 
each other; the elements are all at discord. 
What is the matter with the ocean ? 

" In name of great Oceanus, 
By the earth-shaking Neptune's mace," 

what is the matter ? A thousand Niagaras let 
loose chase each other to our very feet. Great, 
green, glittering walls of wave, they rise far 
out, moving slowly, slowly on ; reaching higher, 
higher, as they come ; till, full before us, quiv- 
ering, toppling, they rush upon the rocks ; rise, 
lash, break, and lash again, with stupendous 
roar. Other waves, distinct and individual as 
animate beings, dart up from the ocean, and, 
with white manes far outspread, absolutely fly 
above the water. Fleet, terrible is their race, 
these chariots of the sea, with Triton their 
trumpeter, till in swift collision they strike, and 
lie shattered on the shoie. 

Pan is not dead. The Ocean of God is 
moved to its deepest cavern, crying aloud, as if 
it knew the message which it this instant bears 
of the folly and misery of man. This moment 



36 OUTLINES. 

the electric cliord within it is repeating to the 
world another of the awful tragedies of history, 
as Napoleon III. the Man of Destiny, imbecile 
and old, succumbs at last to fate ; and men 
beloved, the sacrifice of kings, lie slain on a 
hundred battle-fields. 



IV. 

INDIAN SUMMER IN VIRGINIA. 

Tell me, please, when Indian Summer comes. 
The trouble is, I never found any one yet quite 
certain when its perfect days dawn and fade 
away from the world. It must be that Indian 
Summer comes, and goes, and comes again, at 
her own gracious and golden will, through all 
the months of October and November. In early 
October, when its scarlet conflagration spreads 
from mountain to mountain, till they blaze from 
base to summit ; when the first veil of mist 
floats over their tops, and the first golden 
nebulaB sails down the valleys ; when the physi- 
cal and spiritual sense within us is first touched 
by that coolness and stillness, that softness and 
sadness, which, penetrating the fervor of the 
later Summer, is Autumn- — then our news- 
papers and our neighbors tell us that it is the 
beginning of the Indian Summer. 

But a whole month later, when the color 
carnival is nearly, ended, when the intense scar- 
lets and ambers have burned into ashen hues ; 



38 OUTLINES. 

when the evergreen of pine and cedar, the 
garnet of the oak, alone throw rich shadows 
across lingering lichens and the purpling grays of 
autumnal mosses ; when crows caw in dismantled 
woods, and squirrels scamper through their 
rustling lairs, and nuts drop into their russet 
beds, and the crickets pipe their shrilly horn 
in the yellow grass, and the wide atmosphere 
seems palpitant with limpid gold, and the 
finest pulses within us tremble, touched by 
the finest phases of sight, and sound, and of 
subtle fragrance — then from the hills, or the 
heavens, we know not which, falls that dream- 
like spell which seems to hold all things in 
peaceful trance, and we stand as in a vision 
amid the transfigured world. We are awed by 
its miracle, and no one need tell us that it is 
Indian Summer. This season reaches perfec- 
tion amid the Virginian hills. It comes early 
and lingers late. Its delicious coolness pervades 
you like a presence before you behold a visible 
token of its advent. I saw its first little scarlet 
flag, waving from the top of a sumach tree, 
weeks and weeks ago. It was not September 
then. Yet it was on that grassy ridge, over 
which the little red flag fluttered, that I caught 
my first autumnal gHmpse for you. Through 
the trees which fringed it I saw marvelous 



INDIAN SUMMER IN VIRGINIA. 39 

glimpses of the Shenandoah, with its sea-green 
gleam, flashing at intervals 'far up the valley ; 
and on either side the first mountains of the 
Blue Ridge lifted their softly-scolloped edges 
toward the deeper sky. Yet it is not for these 
that I would have you §ee what I saw. It is 
very sentimental, you know, wandering about 
searching for views ; and you and I wish to be 
practical and wise ! Let no imagination touch 
these broken ramparts, these deserted forts, 
these high-piled earthworks, looking as if they 
had been throAvn up but yesterday ; these rifle- 
pits, these battered canteens, these flattened 
bullets lying in the grass, these scattered graves. 
Three years ago this fragrant wood-way was 
alert with manly life. Great guns pointed to- 
ward that lonely river ; bayonets glistened 
above those low-boughed oaks. Five years ago 
this hour I saw the sun set below these moun- 
tains, swathing these steeps in peaceful light, 
crowning with sacrificial glory ten thousand 
men in line of battle before the foe. The fight 
was deadly. Man mocked the peace of God 
with the impotence of war. The shock of can- 
non shook these hills. Shells ploughed the se- 
rene ether with fiendish yell. Musketry rattled. 
Everywhere around us were the dying and 
the dead. Far as the sight could reach, along 



40 OUTLINES. 

the white road, in ghastly line, moved "the 
anguish-laden ambulance." Through the twi- 
light, through the starlight, pierced the cry of 
the wounded. My God ! Who that ever heard 
it can forget ! 

And noiv ? The sumach waves its scarlet 
flag above that battle-ground. That battle- 
ground where so many knightly hearts beat 
and bled, where so many fair young lives went 
down in sacrifice, was now gay with golden- 
rod. The wild-rose blossomed in the covert of 
the fort ; on the very edge of the rifle-pit the 
evening primrose held up its cup of gold. And 
now ? Through the purple haze we look away 
to Maryland Heights and Loudon Mountain. 
We lift our eyes to old South Mountain, and 
behold still the furrows through its woods which 
the batteries cut that day. Below us Antietam 
Creek maunders through the meadows. There 
is Burnside's Bridge, and, on the Sharpsburg 
side, the ancient church into which the wounded 
were carried from the battle-field. Here, in 
God's quiet, sleep the dead of Antietam. The 
dead ? It is the living who are dead ; who 
are false to the cause for which they perished. 
Ten thousand sleep together here. Look at 
the long, long trenches ! They who are buried 
in them, in such close embrace, died in the 



INDIAN SUMMER IN VIRGINIA. 41 

thickest of the fight ; and no power can gather 
their names from oblivion. ''Aged nineteen," 
'' twenty," " twenty-one," and " twenty-two" ! 
Thus we walk on, and on, and find no record 
which tells that the soldier below lived twenty- 
five earthly years. Was it not the flower of 
the people, in truth, that perished for country 
and the humanity of man. The battle still 
goes on. The old, old battle of truth and false- 
hood, of might with right, of corruption with 
the incorruptible. On the anniversary of that 
battle, when the nation agonized for its life, 
demagogues, who have betrayed every sacred 
principle for which these soldiers died, dared to 
profane the silence of their rest by shouting 
words of party rant and of political intrigue 
above these graves. I looked on their bloated 
faces, and beside them came other faces — 
powder-grimed, death-pale, imploring-eyed — 
the faces of men that I saw die. It was grief 
unfeigned that cried : Was it for this, only tJiiSj 
you perished, O my land's beloved ! O ye 
living, do you realize the cost of every prize 
which Freedom holds precious ? Then let us 
dedicate ourselves anew to be worthy of our 
heritage. Only through a manhood and a 
womanhood consecrated, exalted, can we prove 
to after ages that our dead died not in vain. 



42 ' OUTLINES. 

It is through indiTidual. purity "that the na- 
tion shall, under God, have a new birth of 
freedom ; and that goyemments of the people, 
for the people, shall not perish from the earth." 
Since that September evening what superlative 
days have trailed their splendors along these 
mountain-sides ! They linger, still. As I see 
the great pines on the mountain-tops dip their 
needles in the gold of the ascending sun, I say, 
" Another matchless morning ! It must be the 
last ! " And when the sun drops down the 
valley, and its sentinel mountains change 
from amethyst to amber, and vale and river 
are flushed vdth unimagined hues, I say " Italy 
cannot more than mate this sunset ! But there 
cannot be another ! " Yet the perfect days 
have merged into weeks, and still the miracle 
goes on. It is as if Summer — not the im- 
passioned queen whose ensanguined death we 
watched upon the mountain yonder ; but ano- 
ther Summer, serener, softer than the first — 
smiled in the very face of Winter, brightening 
the world ere she leaves it forever. 



V. 

CHARLES SUMNER'S HOIVIE. 

The eastern sunsliine pouring down upon the 
blooming city does not add its brightness to 
any spot in Washington so pleasant as that 
lying within the compass of Arlington Hotel, 
Lafayette Square, and the Executive grounds 
and mansion. In Winter, or Spring, or Autumn 
the scene here is always metropolitan and beau- 
tiful. Within this radius are the winter homes 
of Mr. Sumner, Vice-President Colfax, Gen- 
eral Fremont, General Irwin, General Butler, 
General Bancroft, Secretary Belknap, Speaker 
Blaine, Secretary Fish, and many other public 
persons. The asphalte pavement scarcely sends 
back a sound, yet it is covered with glittering 
equipages and thronged with richly-dressed 
women and children, while the ample halls of 
the Arlington are perpetually sending forth a 
gayly dressed and distinguished throng. 

But in April, without warning, Lafayette 
Square breaks into a sudden splendor which 
makes all mortal splendor poor. The trees 



44 OUTLINES, 

which line and arch the street on either side 
take on a sudden glory which shames the bare 
and chill arcades of their northern brethren. 
Never was there a deeper depth of bloom than 
that which draws and holds the vision in these 
deep blossomed trees. I never gaze into them 
without thinking what they would have been to 
the eyes and souls of De Guerin and Thoreau. 
They slowly sway their green pendants against 
the gold of the evening sky, and the very 
movement soothes one like the music of con- 
tent. 

The sunshine, glimmering through the green 
roof of the park, enters the eastern windows of 
a house opposite, and, hovering over its pictures 
and works of art, seems to flood its rooms with 
somewhat of that light which never was on sea 
or shore. It needs all the potency of the east- 
em sun to bring out upon these canvases the 
full glory of color, and to suffuse the tints of 
the artist with the vivid splendors of actual 
Nature. On these walls hang original paint- 
ings by Tintoretto, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, Sir Benjamin West, Gerard Douw, 
Gainsborough, with a captivating collection of 
proof engravings. In the large back parlor, 
half-dining, half-drawing-room, the fine light 
of the morning shines full upon one of the ma- 



CHARLES SUMNER'S HOME. 45 

terial beauties of the court of Charles the Sec- 
ond, and upon the portrait of Hannah More, 
at thirteen, by Sir Joshua Rejmolds — two por- 
traits of opposite types of womanhood, the 
latter preeminent in intellectual beauty, show- 
ing a face in coloring and expression never to 
be forgotten. 

On the easels in the bay-window we see a 
group of Spanish officers in a Holland guard- 
house. They are smoking their pipes and 
holding up wine-cups in their exquisite hands, 
as if reveling in mirth and " dreamful ease," in 
utter oblivion of a Dutch guard-house. Oppo- 
site, the Holland lacemaker sits in her open 
porch. Without, there is a glimpse of summer 
sky ; its tranquil light peers in and plays upon 
her placid face. It is the realization of repose. 
There is rest in the movement of the soft hands 
weaving the thread above the pillow, and in 
the very dog asleep at her side.. Between these 
homely pictures of realistic life stands the 
marble daughter of a king. 

" She was so beautiful that, had she stood 
On windy Ida by the oaken wood 
Troy might have stood till now with happy days, 
. . . And Psyche is her name in stories old.'' 

An exquisite life-size marble, copied from the 
antique original at Naples. 



'46 OUTLINES, 

In a painting over the mantel a god is de- 
scending to break the chains of a slave. Here 
are a portrait of Benjamin Frankhn, busts of 
Longfellov^ and of Everett, while engraved 
heads of many of the masters of the world Ime 
the wall from floor to ceiling. In another part 
of the room fruits and flowers suggest beauty 
and cheer. Everywhere there is color and 
warmth. High ideas and the forms of beauty 
are alike embodied in the tints and outlines of 
art. Yet all are toned into harmony under one 
artistic hand. Nothing seems too beautiful to 
be enjoyed, and the aspect and atmosphere of 
the room are not more poetical than homelike. 
But the adjoining apartment is preeminently 
the scholar's room. You pass its open threshold, 
to stand bewildered, on the first glance, at its 
profusion of bronzes, busts, statuettes in marble, 
antique souvenirs, various vases, photographs, 
engravings, and paintings. Yet the carpet un- 
der your feet is true to the suggestions of Na- 
ture, as all carpets should be — softly green as 
the May turf, covered with golden stars, like the 
dandelions dotting meadows. One side of the 
room is hung with engravings from Turner; 
and here is the ancient head of young Augustus, 
from which all the portraits of the first Napo- 
leon were modeled. Here is the marble bust of 



CHARLES SUMNERS HOME. 47 

Mr. Sumner, taken in 1839, while lie was edi- 
tor of the " American Jurist ; " here the winged 
Mercury, the Venus of Milo, Hercules, Demos- 
thenes, Pericles in his veiling helmet, with 
kings, philosophers, and dreamers of many ages 
and climes. Above the bookcase hangs a paint- 
ing which pervades the entire room with its de- 
licious atmosphere, It is an Italian landscape, 
by Richard Wilson, the English Claude. 

Apart from its exquisite coloring, it attracts 
and holds one through " the subtle secret of the 
air " — that depth of distance which draws the 
sight on, and on, and on ; that marvel of per- 
spective which seems to allure us into eternity 
in the pictures of Turner. But the choicest 
treasures lie out of sight, as choicest treasures 
always do. When these softly shutting drawers 
are opened, they show many a quaint illumi- 
nated book ; a Bible bound in wood, written 
on parchment by some monkish hand, with the 
iron chain which held it to the ancient public 
reading-stall still hanging to it. Here are me- 
diaeval missals, wrought on vellum, with many 
a flowering saintly device, bound in velvet and 
clasped with gold, just as they were when some 
lady prayed over them at the altar in the dim 
past. Here is a diploma given from the Uni- 
versity of Padua, generations since, which bears 



48 OUTLINES. 

every mark of having been a family treasure. It 
is bound in crimson velvet, its Latin printed in 
gold, its pages illuminated with flowers as brill- 
iant in tint as if they had just grown under an 
artist's hands. The portrait of the y(Juth to 
whom it was given looks forth from under this 
gorgeous cover. . Fresh and fair in immortal 
youth is this son of Padua, though all of him 
mortal went back to dust long ago. 

There is nothing on earth more stupidly dull 
than an average autograph book. The vast 
crop grown in Washington certainly has not 
increased their value ; but here are faded names, 
written on parchment scrolls, which stir a thou- 
sand nameless memories. The very sight of 
them seems to people the place with the men 
and women who made the epochs of this world's 
history. Here is a deed in Latin, signed by 
Elizabeth, Queen of England. This overtopping 
" E " and imperial flourish were traced by the 
vain and haughty hand of the tyrannical queen. 
I won't moralize over it ; but it has suggestions. 
So also has this, the name of her brutal father, 
Henry VIIL, traced by his own hand. Here is 
a veritable letter Avritten by Catherine De Med- 
icis to her son, Charles IX. ; and here the pic- 
ture of this woman, great in guile — a handsome 
woman, with a flattened head and a material 



CHARLES SUMNERS HOME, 49 

face, and a stately form, cased within a closely 
fitting robe, likes the scales of a serpent. Here 
also is a letter from Mazarin to Fabri de Pei- 
rese, written from Avignon, 1634, and another 
from Richelieu to the Marquis of Breze, 1632. 
And these are but a few of the names in this 
priceless collection. It is like thrusting one's 
hand back into a far-off age, and drawing 
something out of its silence, to hft this little 
book from the drawer wherein it lies. It is 
called an " Album Amicorum," and was kept 
by a Neapolitan nobleman, Camillus Cordoyn, 
at Geneva, during the first half of the ITth cen- 
tury. This town being on the highroad to Italy, 
at that time, it was -a favorite stopping-place. 
This album contains several hundred auto- 
graphs of different nations, each with a motto 
or sentiment attached. Among these are those 
of German princes, French noblemen, English 
Cavaliers, and Roundheads. This is the inscrip- 
tion by the famous Lord Strafford, when a 
young man, on his continental tour : '' Qui vivit 
notus omnibus ignotus moritur sibi^ 1612." 
John Milton, on his way back from Italy, 
shortly before his return to England, wrote in 
this book the last line of his own '' Comus," 
which was already published before he began 
his travels. 

4 



50 OUTLINES. 

Here it is in Washington to-day, 1871, its 
freshness scarcely dimmed, as sensitive and deli- 
cate in characters as the day on which they were 
traced : — 

" If virtue feeble were 
Heaven itself would stoop to her.'^ 
Coelum non animum muto dum trans mare curro. 

Joannes Miltonius Anglus, Junii 10, 1639. 

Here is John Bunyan's Bible with its worm- 
eaten cover and well-worn brass knobs, and here 
a book from Madame Pompadour's library, a 
dainty thing — bound with faded rose-colored 
watered silk, its cover chased in gold, illumi- 
nated with vividly tinted flowers and her royal 
coat of arms, meet memento of the imperious 
and intellectual mistress of Louis Fifteenth. 
Here is the original copy of Burns' '' Scots wha 
hae wi' Wallace bled," in the clear bold writing 
of the poet, and here the original manuscript 
of Pope's " Essay on Man," with all the eras- 
ures and interlinings added by the fastidious 
writer, just as they were left by his pencil — 
O ! how long ago at Twickenham — and here, 
lying with others on the library table -in its 
plain morocco cover and soft ribbons, looking 
scarcely different from its mates, is a book once 
owned by the haughty and unfortunate Earl of 
Essex. What memories of passion and fury, 



CHARLES SUMMERS HOME. 51 

of folly and fate, are recalled by these two little 
names written ages ago by their owner, Robert 
Essex ? 

Here are the manuscripts of Edmund Burke 
— letters written by his own hand, extending 
through a length of years, carefully bound. 
Great Britain has allowed to pass from her 
keeping these treasures of the great master of 
English eloquence, and they find a fitting shrine 
in the house of another master as great as he. 
In the same drawer there is a little old worn 
schoolbook, with a schoolboy's name written 
on the title-page in a schoolboy's scrawl , and 
with a schoolboy's spiral flourish at the end. 
The name is " John Dryden ; " and this little 
old book, the one that he used when at West- 
minster School, in 1646, is full of his Greek ex- 
ercises, interlined throughout with Latin, trans- 
lations of the Greek sentences, in the boy's own 
hand. And the schoolboy's book of Old Eng- 
land of 1646 is the precise prototype of the 
schoolboy's book of Ne^ England in 1871. 

Personally nothing could be more interest- 
ing than the first small printed copy of the 
'' Spring " of Thomson's Seasons, published in 
1728. This is the author's copy — the one he 
presented to the woman he loved. It was ac- 



52 OUTLINES. 

companied with the following verses, on the fly- 
leaf, written by his own hand : — 

TO MISS YOUNG. 
" Accept, loved Young ! this tribute due 
To tender Friendship, Love and you; 
And with it take what breathed the whole — 
Oh, take to thine the Poet's soul! 

• If Fancy here her power displays, 
And if an heart exalts these Lays, 
Thou fairest in that Fancy shine. 
And all that heart is fondly thine. *' 

On another page is copied a portion of a let- 
ter from Thomson to this lady, whom he was 
never permitted to marry. It has been said 
that model love-letters are rare in this nine- 
teenth century. They may have been in the 
eighteenth ; but in this it transmits to us, at 
least, one perfect. Its tender rhythm is not sur- 
passed . by the most melodious lines in the 
'* Castle of Indolence." 

" Hagley, August 29, 1743. 
" At the source of this water composed of some 
pretty rills that purl beneath the roots of oaks there 
is as fine a retired seat as love could wish. There I 
often sit and with an exquisite mixture of pleasure 
and pain, of all that love can boast of excellent and 
tender, think of you. But why do I talk of sitting 
and thinking of you there ? Wherever I am, how- 
ever employed, I never cease to think of my lovehest 



CHARLES SUMNER'S HOME. 53 

Miss Young. You are part of mj being ; you mix 
with all my thoughts, even the most studious, and 
without disturbing give them greater harmony and 
spirit. Ah, tell me, do I not, now and then, steal a 
tender thought from you? .... I would rather 
live in the loneliest corner of London with you than 
in the finest country retirement, and that too en- 
livened with the best of society — without you. 

" Think with friendship and tenderness of him 
who with friendship and tenderness is all yours. 

" James Thomson." 

Even the doors of this room are hung with 
pictures. We pass by the " Gate of Victory '* 
into the hall, which is covered with photographs, 
some many feet square, of the Coliseum, the 
group of St. Peters, and the Vatican, and other 
famous Roman and classical views. Beyond, 
the door opens upon the parlor — a small, lus- 
trous salon^ hung and carpeted in gold and azure, 
illuminated with mirrors and paintings, looking 
upon Lafayette Square — the lovely Nature 
without, complementing and crowning the lovely 
art within. 

The house itself is a four-story brick dwelling, 
wdth Mansard roof; attractive by its cheerful- 
ness more than anything else. A bright band 
of green grass holds it from the street, and vis- 
ibly all that divides it from the Executive Man- 



54 OUTLINES. 

sion is the square, full of trees and birds and 
sunny children, which grow and rejoice between. 

You have a glimpse of a small portion of 
Charles Sumner's home. Its chief charm lies 
in this, that it is the unique ard beautiful ex- 
pression of an individual nature. Everywhere 
it reveals the thought and feeling of its owner. 
No house can be a home unless in some sense 
this be true — unless its very furniture is im- 
bued not only with the taste but the affection of 
its possessor. In Washington there are elegant 
and aesthetic houses ; but, as a rule, the abodes 
of its public men are mere temporary stopping- 
places or great upholstered show-shops, showing 
little but the wealth or vulgarity of their own- 
ers. A material and commercial smartness is 
everywhere glaringly visible. This comes from 
the fact that mere speculators, schemers, and 
traffickers are so rapidly buying with money and 
patronage the high places of public trust, once 
filled by scholars, statesmen, and gentlemen. 

It is impossible to recall the refined and 
scholarly memories of Jefferson, Madison, the 
two Adamses, Josiah Quincy, Edward Living- 
ston, Edward Everett, and their peers, without 
regret. They were the men who brought the 
highest culture, the gentleness of gentleman- 
hood, combined with political acumen and power, 



CHARLES SUMNER S HOME. 55 

to the administration of public affairs. The 
house just sketched is interesting as the home 
of a scholar and statesman, one of the last of 
that race of great scholars and statesmen so 
rapidly passing away. 



VI. 

GRAND DUKE ALEXIS IN NEW YORK. 

" Broadway ! Broadway is delicious ! " said 
an English lady. '' It is more intoxicating than 
Paris. Its very atmosphere is like new wine." 
All of us realize this at times. On an October 
morning, perhaps, when the sea-breezes flutter 
still in our garments, when the fragrance of the 
pine forests linger with us, and all the freshness 
that we caught amid the summer hills quickens 
our steps and blooms on our faces — then, step- 
ping on its pavement, '' Broadway is delicious." 
Looking down Broadway upon such a morning, 
reminds me always of Guido's '' Aurora." Gaz- 
ing up above the glittering walls into the exhil- 
arating air, it seems as if one must see her cour- 
sers, with all the heralding graces, making their 
pathway to the sun. But no. The graces are 
all on the sidewalks ; so, too, are the horses. 
Instead of spurning the clouds, they fall down 
on the cobble-stones, and are seized by the 
Society which takes care of horses and prepares 
them for the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet, with 



GRAND DUKE ALEXIS IN NEW YORK. 57 

all the perils of its pavements, Broadway is deli- 
cious on an October morning. On such a morn- 
ing we expected to see '' Alexis." I came home 
from the country in season to see him ; and, 
strange to tell, am not ashamed to own it. Most 
of my friends, I find, seem to feel that there is 
great merit in saying, '' Oh ! I didn't go to see 
the Prince — it was a mere happen ; " or (with 
a superior air), '' / don't run after princes." 
Well, I don't ; but I like to look at them when 
they look as well as Alexis, and have a face and 
head so well worth studying as the pure type of 
an historical race. I went on to Broadway on 
purpose to see the son of the Emperor of Russia, 
and am more than obliged to Mr. Brady for the 
delightful seat in his gallery which gave that 
fair Romanoff face and magnificent head to the 
treasured pictures of memory. Every name 
outside of our personal life is what association 
makes it. Mere curiosity might lead a crowd 
to gaze at the Prince of Wales in Broadway ; 
but to-day his name could inspire no enthusi- 
asm. He has out-lived the fairest promise of his 
youth. His mother and poor Alexandra would 
shed a wife's and mother's tears for him ; but it 
would be better for England to-day if he were 
dead. Eight centuries of kingly blood from 
William the Conqueror, through Robert Bruce, 



58 OUTLINES. 

and all the lumpish and rakish Georges, may 
make him roj^al, but has failed to make him 
noble. If we made geese of ourselves over him 
to-day, it could only be for his mother's sake, or 
because he is heir to her crown. Her son Arthur 
Patrick aroused no enthusiasm in America. He 
was a very tame yomig man ; well enough, but 
no more. The most remarkable thing about 
him was his shirt-collar, and that was ugly. 
Royal blood, from William the Conqueror to 
Albert the Good, have failed to produce in him 
anything more than a perfectly common-place 
young gentleman. I never went into Broadway 
to behold him. It's a Prince I fancy, not princes. 
The Romanoff of the nmeteenth century is a 
sj)lendid creature. When the line o£ Ruric 
ceased, nearly three centuries since, the Roma- 
noff came forth from the people, powerful and 
brutal, and made himself a king. Nearly three 
centuries have gone, and he is still a king — an 
absolute monarch over one of the largest empires 
of earth. To-day he is strong, chivalrous and 
gentle, stately and noble to behold. The young 
man Alexis comes from a race of giants. Peter 
the Great was a giant m frame as well as in 
mind. The Empresses Anne and Elizabeth 
were as strong as men. Catherine the Great, 
with the power and passions of a man, could 



GRAND DUKE ALEXIS IN NEW YORK. 59 

strike a man down with one blow of her hand. 
The Emperor Nicholas, iron in muscle and will, 
was the handsomest man in Europe. His son 
Alexander, the present Emperor of Russia, is 
scarcely less remarkable for manly beauty, and 
in person and presence " every inch a king." 
The wife of Nicholas, beautiful and good, was a 
daughter of the almost divine Louisa of Prussia, 
the loveliest victim ever immolated to the cruelty 
of Napoleon the First. The present Empress of 
Russia comes from a princely house famous for 
the piety and graces of its daughters. Thus I 
said this young man Alexis, whose cortege will 
be here presently, inherits from his ancestors 
many of the most powerful, some of the worst, 
and some of the best traits in human nature. 
Meanwhile, through the crystal air came the 
distant throbbing of advancing drums and the 
measured beat of marching feet The last Oc- 
tober day in its matchless procession of perfect 
days had gone by. It loitered long for his com- 
ing ; but the ocean refused to give up Alexis. 
Now November had hushed her storms for a 
day, and hung out the brightest of blue banners 
to salute him. It is worth a journey to New 
York to see Broadway in all the bravery of an 
ovation. The daily repeated chill of long delay 
had failed to rob this of its splendor or majesty; 



60 OUTLINES. 

for in miles on miles of concentrated, eager hu- 
man life there is always majesty. Far as the 
eye could see, up and down, Broadway was lit- 
erally packed with human beings. Across the 
street, Stewart's shop of marble, covering an 
entire block, was lined at every window from 
base to summit with ladies and children. From 
the windows of other shops all goods had been 
taken, and, tier on tier, to their tops, they were 
lined with gayly-dressed women. 

" Look there ! " exclaimed one gentleman to 
another, in astonishment, at the sight of a great 
Broadway shop-window, filled to the top with 
feminine creatures. " That's the handsomest 
show-window I ever saw." The ladies blushed 
and looked discomfited at attracting such atten- 
tion ; but they would not come down. They 
would see the Prince. Men crowded the house- 
tops, clung to the walls and steeples of the 
churches ; and one man (there is always sure to 
be one who must attract attention to his own 
insignificant self, no matter what the occasion) 
one man hung himself out from the spire of 
Grace Church, and amused himself by keeping 
humane mortals below in a perpetual fright lest 
he should drop upon the pavement and smash 
his foolish head. Flags flew from every house- 
top ; pennons and devices floated out from ten 



GRAND DUKE ALEXIS IN NEW YORK. 61 

thousand mndows ; boys stood on the street 
holding aloft garlands and baskets of flowers, 
from whose hearts stood forth in scarlet blos- 
soms the name of " Alexis." Richly-dressed 
ladies, in open carriages, sat at all the cor- 
ners. At last the crowd began to push forward, 
then to sway back before the advance of a 
platoon of mounted policemen. Then came 
more than a thousand policemen, in a solid body, 
as one man ; then a regiment, with banners and 
band ; then four regiments of young men, form- 
ing a hollow square. In its centre, in a car- 
riage drawn by four jet-black horses, with gold-* 
mounted harness, rode the young man of the 
hour. He sat head and shoulders above the 
three other gentlemen in the carriage, and was 
conspicuous, not for his attire, which was the 
uniform of a lieutenant in the Russian navy, 
but for his powerful stature, and for the height 
of his head, which rose like a dome under its 
" glory " of golden hair. People, thinking only 
of the prince a moment before, forgot him in 
admiration of the man. Handkerchiefs waved, 
huzzas went up. Alexis bowed his head to his 
friends. Thus, amid flowers and banners, beau- 
tiful women, glad music, and the shouts of the 
people, followed by miles on miles of mounted 
and marching men, thousands of whom were as 



62 OUTLINES. 

fair, as young, and as brave as himself, tlie son 
of the Emperor of Russia entered the metrop- 
ohs of the country to which he has proved so 
devoted an ally. For, after all, until the mo- 
ment that they saw his face, it was only the son 
of the Emperor of Russia that the people waited 
to see. He was not even the heir to its throne. 
True, it had been told of him that his twenty- 
two years had already compassed deeds of hero- 
ism ; that he was a true sailor in a storm at 
twelve years of age ; that he had rushed into 
the water and saved a strange young girl from 
drowning, at the risk of his life ; and these deeds 
proved that he was more than a prince — a 
man, with the inborn nobility of manhood in 
him. Yet not for this was he honored. He 
was welcomed for his father, who received an 
American admiral with royal honor, who has 
never spared money or pains, even in his recep- 
tion of private American citizens, and who was 
America's steadfast friend in her darkest hour. 
It was New York welcoming Russia. Yet no 
less the Archduke Alexis wins good-will for 
himself wherever he goes. His striking person 
and presence, combined with a singular mod- 
esty of demeanor, disarms criticism, and inclines 
the loudest " sovereign " citizen to pardon him 
for having been born a prince, and to like him 



GRAND DUKE ALEXIS IN NEW YORK. 63 

as a man. For this, personally, he will be the 
longest remembered and admired — that, had 
he not been the son of an emperor, no less he 
would have commanded respect and admiration 
as a man. 

The Archduke Alexis is over six feet high, 
with great breadth and depth of chest, an erect 
carriage, and a head remarkable for its height 
and development of reverence, veneration, and 
benevolence. Whatever else he may forget to 
do, he will never forget to say his prayers. The 
upper part of his face is of remarkable beauty. 
The hair, waving and golden, is cut short. His 
forehead is intellectual, his eyes of deep blue, 
large and full, with those swift scintillations of 
everchanging expression which betray the soul 
and make the finest charm of any human face. 
The best of his face is its manhness. It is a 
thoughtful, earnest face, the face of a man who 
would be no less noble in trial and adversity 
than amid all the splendors of fortune. His 
hands are simply huge, and have the grip of a 
Polar bear. At least, they are capable of bear- 
ing more handshaking than ordinary hands. I 
saw him go through with this American ordeal 
the other evening. He did it with patience and 
grace, if not with enthusiasm. It gave a sturdy, 
unsentimental grasp to the daintiest kid-gloved 



64 OUTLINES, 

hand outstretched to him. But the face of 
Alexis told many stories during the process. 
One instant it looked pleased, the next weary, 
the next indifferent, and the next would brighten 
again. " He is very handsome and agreeable," 
said a young lady who danced with him ; 
''but he has the ugliest hand I ever saw." 
And, if she makes the thin, sensitive, nervous 
American hand her criterion, it is not strange 
that she calls this giant fist ugly. It is an ugly, 
honest hand, that looks as if it had travelled 
down the Romanoff line from a day when the 
Romanoffs were not "royal." If the Grand 
Duke can't dance well, he can walk with a will. 
Head and shoulders above all the company, he 

went about with Miss on his arm. The 

young lady was very graceful and pretty, in 
blue crape, with a little blue feather and pink 
aigrette in her hair. As the two went laughing 
and chatting through the crowd, they were fair 
to see. It was the story, old as the earth, of the 
youth and the maiden. In their glorious young 
manhood and womanhood both were royal. 
We prose over the vanity of earthly honors ; 
yet no less it is the splendor of life to be born 
to its purple. It is of heaven to be young, 
beautiful, and beloved. " I was young then^^ 
Madame De Stael would say, and burst in tears, 



GRAND DUKE ALEXIS IN NEW YORK. 65 

whenever, in exile or sorrow, she recalled the 
glory of her youth. If it is the scion of an il- 
lustrious race, the representative of a vast and 
friendly power, the. son of an emperor, no less 
it is youth, beauty, bravery, and manhood, 
whom America welcomed in the young man 
Alexis. 

5 



vn. 

A RAINY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY. 

A RAINY morning in an old country home is 
rich in compensations. Only in the country do 
the real homes of the land remain unprofaned 
and unmolested. The great city is full of 
" residences," which change inmates every year. 
Occupied by nomadic and transitory tribes, 
precious memories and hfe-long associations 
have no time to take root within their shallow 
walls. They are merely stopping-places, in 
which hundreds of successive families halt for 
a season in their pilgrimage from the cradle to 
the grave. They are prized according to their 
rent, their modern conveniences, the fashion of 
the street on which they stand. The old home 
in the country is beloved because in it children 
were born and died ; because in its old rooms 
sons and daughters have grown from childhood 
to man's and woman's estate ; because its doors 
have closed behind them when they went forth 
to meet their fate, and opened in tender welcome 
when they returned in sorrow or in triumph 



A RAINY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY. 67 

from the world. What if its ceilings are low, 
its rooms old-fashioned, its antique furniture 
glossy with time instead of veneering : here 
Jenny was born, here Johnny died, here Tom 
and Molly were married, here father and mother 
grew old, and hither children and grandchildren 
came to renew the youth and revive the joy of 
the generation before. The old house is dear 
because it is a home consecrated to a family 
life, sanctified by all its love and suffering, 
by grief outlived and by affection perpetually 
renewed. 

A rainy morning in such a house is a precious 
season. To be sure the old rooster in the barn- 
yard looks forlorn, and I am glad of it. His 
tail is very wet and droopy, and he waves that 
baton of power with a shade less of authority, 
and reminds me less aggravatingly than usual 
of Brigham Young, the only man on earth 
whom I really wish to be hung. The rain dims 
the jeweled leaves of the maples across the 
street. The sunshine, that sent a thousand 
gUttering lances through their scarlet and am- 
ber masses yesterday, to-day has disappeared; 
the mountains have merged into a sky of cloud ; 
the rain beats on the near roof in myriad pulses, 
which seem to keep time with the memories 
that fill this old closet. It is an old closet, full 



68 OUTLINES. 

of old books — the family books of one, two, 
three generations. Here are the children's books 
— painted, scrawled, thumbed, and old. The 
children who laid them down are men and 
tv^omen now. And one, the little girl who died, 
is "a fair maiden in her Father's mansions." 
The boy who brooded for hours over the ballad 
of " Lucy Gray," and whose childhood was 
filled with mournful conjectures concerning her 
uncertain fate as stated in the closing verse in 
the " Third Class Reader," — 

"Yet some maintain that to this day 
She is d living child," — 

has lived to grow sick and sad over human 
carnage, and to restore many a '' solitary child." 
And the boy who painted his young ^'trainers " 
such a deep blue, while he read, 

" Oh! were you ne'er a school boy, 
And did you never train? " 

lived to more then " play march, march away," 
and to face death bravely in many of his coun- 
try's battles. Well, well, who would not be a 
child again, if only to be drilled in the "Rhe- 
torical Reader," and to feel the new thrill when 
reading for the first time the " Burial of Sir 
John Moore," and 

** On Linden, when the sun was low,'* 



A RAINY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY. 69 

with the real quiver of the " rising and falling 
inflection," and the exquisite pleasure of grow- 
ing pathetic over the quaver in one's own voice, 
to say nothing of the delicious tears at the 
first consciousness of pathetic sentiment. 

But, if one wants to note the varying fashion 
in mere literary style, let me commend them to 
the old magazines and annuals of vanished 
generations. Here is an old " Museum," pub- 
lished before I was born. Its front page is 
garnished with a full-length .portrait of Wash- 
ington Irving, in a frock-coat nearlj^ to his 
ankles, boots with pointed toes, one thumb to 
his chin, a seal in the fingers of one hand, and 
a letter in the fingers of the other. A more 
affected and absurd picture of a sensible man it 
would be difficult to imagine. Yet it does not 
equal the description of it, copied from " Fraser's 
Magazine." It says : — 

" From his steadfast gaze, and the smile of soft 
delight which is lighting up his countenance, we 
should think that he is thinking of the fair clime of 
Andalusia^ and of the dark blue waters of the GuadaU 
quiver. We know not if he be a smoher ; but, to 
judge by his gentlemanly appearance he ought to be 
one! Smoking is and ahvays has been a healthy 
and fashionable English custom. There were schools 
and professors estabHshed here for the purpose of 
teaching the mystery of smoking, on the introduction 



70 OUTLINES. 

of the Virginia weed ; and the mode of expiljicating 
the smoke out of one's mouth is at present a shib- 
boleth demonstrative of an English gentleman. TVe 
could hardly conceive of anything in the shape of a 
gentlemanly biped coming from the nondescript sav- 
ages of America. We were, however, agreeably 
surprised in Mr. Irving, who, from a nine days* 
wonder, has become the greatest favorite," etc. 

Touohing the present day, and yet not of it, 
are Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's " Letters from 
New York." They are, as all letters should 
be, a reflection of their writer ; and being this, 
are full of the sunshine of a sunny tempera- 
ment, and the love of God and man and Nature. 
Indeed, a denizen of to-day must marvel how 
through any mere letters from New York could 
be filtered so mucb of the fragrance and bloom 
of field and wood, — so much of the light which 
hovers over sea and shore. It proves not only 
that to the heart that loves her Nature is never 
wholly absent, even in the great city into which 
she peers down between high housetops and 
through scanty patches of barren land; but 
also how since that day the great city has 
grown, feeding upon Nature and hiding her 
from sight. It reads like a romance to-day, 
these words written in 1844 : " Wandering over 
the fields between Hoboken and Weehawken, I 
came upon the loveliest little clump of violets, 



A RAINY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY, 71 

nestKng in the hollow of an old moss-grown 
stump." Alas ! where that '' loveliest clump 
of violets nestled " stone cellars strike far down- 
ward to-day, and high walls pierce upward, 
shutting humanity and its necessary vegetables 
in, and Nature and violets wholly out. 

To one who never saw Brooklyn, Jersey City, 
Hoboken, save as blistering cities, it seems like a 
story-book to read of them all in these glowing 
pages as Elysian Fields, fringing and fanning 
with vernal beauty and delicious breezes great 
New York. It is harsh and hard, the inexora- 
ble law of growth in a vast city, which, in pro- 
portion to the advance of commerce and wealth, 
shuts Nature out. With all its splendor and 
resistless Hfe, New York is fast becoming one of 
the loneliest places on the earth for a home. In 
its aggregate it is great and grand ; in its individ- 
ual life it is isolated and alone. The largest in- 
dividual circle in it widens out but a little way. 
The sweetest, truest, greatest heart that throbs 
within its limit can cease to beat, nor yet be 
missed. One of the loneliest sights on earth is 
a funeral in Broadway. Year by year the resist- 
less tide of change sweeps on, tearing up and 
bearing on human sympathies and landmarks 
with it. Where fountains played, and shade 
trees swung their protectmg branches, and 



72 OUTLINES. 

homes were sheltered a year ago, to-day shop- 
signs are thrust out, and the great palaces of 
trade push their heads high in air, and the 
human crowds jostling below are more and more 
strangers to each other. The days when Peter 
Stuyvesant stumped about on his wooden leg, 
and the Dutch burgomasters and their famihes 
visited from '• stoop " to '' stoop," through all 
the evening hours, are remote enough to belong 
to another world. '' All, all are gone, the old 
familiar places." But it is conlforting to learn 
that the growth of the city is not exclusively in 
houses, railroads, and bridges. 

At least, we are better to the dogs than they 
were when dear Mrs. Child wrote her letters 
from New York. She says : '^ Twelve or fifteen 
hundred of these animals have been killed this 
summer. The manner of it strikes me as ex- 
ceedingly cruel and demoralizing. The poor 
creatures are knocked down on the pavement 
and beat to death. Sometimes they are hor- 
ribly mained, and run howling and limping 
away. The company of dog-killers themselves 
are a frightful sight, with their bloody clubs 
and spattered garments." Though further 
apart, after all, let us be grateful that we live 
in the era of Mr. Bergh and of the '^ Society for 
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals." 



A RAINY MORNING IN TEE COUNTRY. 73 

Here is a venerable book, belonging to a 
woman's library in a secluded New England 
village, unknown of railroads forty years ago. 
The staple of ladies' libraries in our day being 
composed of very " light literature " and sensa- 
tional novels of the frothiest description, it is 
of interest to find out what sort of books our 
grandmothers — the women who spun and wove 
their own garments — read. This is one of 
them : " The Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter," 
of England. Gh, what a book for a rainy day ! 
It transports me from my little closet of mouldy 
books to the own room of this great woman 
scholar of the eighteenth century, immediately 
after breakfast, when she says : " My first care 
is to water the pinks and roses which are stuck 
in about twenty different parts of my room." 

Besides, though contrary to constitutional 
habit, I attempt to join her in her walks before 
breakfast ; " sometimes on an open common, 
then in the middle of a corn-field, then in a 
close shady lane, never before frequented by 
any animal but birds. Then she naively adds : 
" When some civil swains pull off their hats, 
and I hear them signifying that /am Parson 
Carter's daughter, I had much rather be ac- 
costed with, ' Good-morrow, sweetheart ; ' or, 
* Are you walking for a wager ? ' " This Parson 



74 .^1 ^ ' OUTLINES. 

Carter did a very sensible tiling. He educated 
his children himself — his daughters as exten- 
sively and thoroughly as his sons. He was re- 
warded. His daughter Elizabeth was the delight 
of his life and the comfort and support of his 
old ao^e. When, throuo^h a dechne of his health 
and spirits, he felt unequal to undertaking the 
education of his youngest son, the arduous task 
was assumed by his daughter. Though eagerly 
sought by the most learned and brilliant society 
of London, she resisted all importunities, and 
secluded herself in the country for five years, 
in order to fulfill this work. Yet, meanwhile, 
in her leisure hours she fomid time to translate 
" Epiotetus," a work which made her known to 
the whole world of scholars. It was of this 
book that the Archbishop of Canterbury after- 
ward remarked to her : " Here, Madam Carter, 
see how ill I am used by the world. Here are 
my sermons selhng at half price; while your 
' Epictetus ' truly is not to be had under eigh- 
teen shillings — only three shillings less than 
-the original subscription." 

It was at the urgent request of the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Oxford 
that she at last reluctantly undertook this work. 
In reply to a le^tter asking her to write tjie Uf e of 
Epictetus, she wrote to her friend, Miss Talbot, 



A RAINY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY. 75 

1755 : " Whoever that somebody 7)r other is 
to write the life of Epictetus, seeing I have a 
dozen shirts to maJce^ I do opine, dear Miss 
Talbot, that it cannot be I." 

In 1756 her brother and pupil passed a 
triumphant examination and entered at Cam- 
bridge. Her biographer says : " Mr. Henry 
Carter is, perhaps, the only instance of a student 
at Cambridge who was indebted for his previ- 
ous education wholly to one of the other sex ; 
and this circumstance excited no small surprise 
there, when, after his examination, it was asked 
at what school he had been brought up." 

In his extreme old age, her father became 
wholly dependent upon her for personal care. 
In reply to commiserating friends, she then 
wrote : " I am much obliged to you for the 
kind partiality which makes you regret my giv- 
ing up my time to domestic economy. As to 
anything of this kind hurting the dignity of 
my head, I have no idea of it, even if the head 
were of much more consequence than I feel it to 
be. The true post of honor consists in the dis- 
charge of those duties, whatever they happen 
to be, which arise from that situation in which 
Providence has fixed, and which we may be as- 
sured is the very situation best calculated for 
our virtue and happiness." 



76 OUTLINES, 

I confess to a spontaneous liking for this 
learned and gentle lady of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. There is a charm in her sunny quietness 
that rests one in this noisy day. She studied 
and mastered Greek and many other languages 
without ado. She translated Epictetus in a man- 
ner which commanded the praise of the great- 
est scholars in Europe ; but, therefore^ did not 
disdain to make her father's shirts. The sew- 
ing-machine makes it superfluous that any 
woman should stitch her eyes out in our genera- 
tion ; but the disposition, come to be deemed 
almost a virtue, which scorns any labor of the 
hands because it is labor, which turns with con- 
tempt from the pleasant household tasks which 
for so many centuries have been preeminently 
woman's, calling that drudgery which adds so 
much to the charm of home, is a repelling draw- 
back to the finest of modern accomphshments. 



VIII. 

MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI. 

THE FRIEND. 

Not a generation has passed since the re- 
morseless waves of the ocean swept IMargaret 
Fuller Ossoli from human sight, and akeady 
she wears the kistre of the historic woman. 
This is remarkable for an American ; more re- 
markable that this American is a woman. We 
have our full share of men-heroes — heroes 
whose deeds have made them worthy of the 
Olympian days ; but the women whom we have 
lauded the loudest have been essentially hum- 
drum. Martha Washington was well enough. 
She knitted stockings well and loved her hus- 
band. Thousands of other women have done 
the same, whose pictures do not hang in our 
parlors or line our photograph albums. The 
women who, by virtue of high . endowment, 
would have made their names immortal through 
lack of the mere chance of personal develop- 
ment, have died and made no sign ; while the 
women whom we have most delighted to honor 
have been chiefly remarkable because they 



78 OUTLINES, 

bore tlieir husbands' names. But the name of 
Margaret Fuller is still spoken by those who 
knew her in life with an enthusiam, a rever- 
ence, a tenderness, which but few human beings 
inspire ; and for which, amid the fragments of 
her recorded thoughts, we search in yain for a 
commensurate cause. She wrote suggestively 
and well. On every page we see the results 
of a wide and accurate scholarship, such as at 
that time no other American woman, and but 
few American men, had attained ; yet in her 
there existed more than ordinary antagonism 
between thought and its slow instrument of ex- 
pression, the pen. Her swift and ductile mind 
constantly outflew its halting paces. On her 
written page we continually feel her limitations. 
Her style is often involved, as if it stumbled for 
lack of room amid its own crowd of treasures. 
It is only occasionally, and that when she is 
writing heart to heart to a friend, that her ex- 
pression seems to reach the utmost measure of 
her thoughts. Perhaps in her work on Italy, 
written after she had grown on through the 
deepest human experience, she attained to per- 
fect freedom and power in the use of written 
language. But this perfect flower of her mind 
and heart perished with her. Thus in the frag- 
mentary thought which she has left we find 



MARGARET FULLER OS SOLI THE FRIEND. 79 

nothing adequate to her reputation. This 
makes her wide and ever-widening fame the 
more remarkable. It is another ilkistration of 
the illimitable power of one great personality. 
It proves how one rare individual, through the 
pure force of its individuality, may live on and 
on long after its human home has perished. In 
looking back through the centuries, we find that 
the fame of women has always been more purely 
personal than that of men. Men have perpetu- 
ated their names through their works and 
deeds ; women, restrained in the use of their 
powers, have been able to leave little more to 
the world than the legacy of their lives. But 
to these lives the human race will never cease 
to pay homage. Thus Margaret Fuller never 
wrote anything that was half as noble as her- 
self. There was a pathetic charm in her nature 
beyond the reach of her words ; yet her words 
were often pathetic, and in oral speech were 
most eloquent. Her dear friend, James Free- 
man Clarke, says : ^' She did many things well, 
but nothing so well as she talked. For some 
reason or other, she could never deliver herself 
in print as she did with her lips. Her conversa- 
tion I have seldom heard equaled. Though re- 
markably fluent and select, it was neither flu- 
ency, nor choice diction, nor vrit, nor sentiment 



80 OUTLINES. 

that gave it its peculiar power ; but accu'racy of 
statement, keen discrimination, and a certain 
weight of judgment, which contrasted strongly 
and charmingly with the youth and sex of the 
speaker. Her speech, though finished and true 
as the most deliberate rhetoric of the pen, had 
always an air of spontaneity which made it seem 
the grace of the moment." Had her powers 
taken their free course, she would have been an 
orator in her own way, taking multitudes captive 
by the wonder of her thought and the music of 
her speech. Never in the remotest manner af- 
fecting the tones or the gestures of men, this 
woman would have used the transcendent gifts 
which God had bestowed upon her as He had 
given them to her. She herself says : " If I 
were a man, the gift I would choose would be 
that of eloquence. That power of forcing the 
vital currents of thousands of human hearts into 
one current, by the constrained power of that 
most delicate instrument, the voice, is so intense 
— yes, I would prefer it to a more extensive 
fame, a more permanent influence." Not a 
man, she was no less eloquent. But her great 
gift, forced back upon herself, flowed out in full 
force only to her friends. We are conscious of 
its reflex power in her most familiar notes. In 
her more labored works we rarely feel a thrill of 



MARGARET FULLER OS SO LI THE FRIEND. 81 

the real inspirational eloquence which pervades 
all her personal letters. Here we are constantly 
surprised by her exhaustive culture, by her 
wealth of illustration, by her almost universal 
comprehensiveness of intellect, by the warmth 
of her temperament, by the tenderness of her 
heart. What could not such a soul give to 
other souls, to whom she was allied by consan- 
guinity of purpose, of pursuit, and of affection ? 
Had she left no other record, that of Margaret 
Fuller as a friend would have been sufficient to 
have perpetuated her memory. She had a gen- 
ius for friendship. Universal sympathy with 
human nature was one of her most prevailing 
characteristics. Her magnanimity, her large 
intelligence, her tenderness made her not only 
comprehend, but feel for every struggle of a 
human heart. Her subtle, penetrating insight 
pierced to the core of every being she met ; 
thus she knew not only what it was, but what 
it might be. She saw the sleeping germ of 
beauty as well as of evil, and her mission to 
every nature was to give to it the best ideal of 
itself. There was no soul so lonely or abject 
that she did not feel drawn toward it through 
the virtue of its humanity. She was the be- 
loved friend of the little child, of the aged, of 
the sick and of the poor. But as the cherished 



82 OUTLINES. 

associate and equal friend of many of the lead- 
ing thinkers of her country and time, Margaret 
Fuller's friendships assume more than a per- 
sonal significance. They give to the world an- 
other illustration of that illustrious race of 
friendships between men and women of the 
highest type which in every age have been 
deeper, broader, and purer than the time in 
which they existed. These friendships illustrate 
also a still more significant fact in human his- 
tory — viz.: that, despite the depravity which 
has characterized the average dealings of men 
toward women, even in the most depraved and 
bigoted ages, the higher order of men and wo- 
men met in absolute individual equality; and 
that the personal power of the femininely grand 
woman in herself has always been more power- 
ful than tradition, prejudice, or custom. Mo- 
nica and St. Augustine ; Susannah, and John, 
and Charles Wesley — friends no less than 
mother and sons ; Francis de Sales and Madame 
De Chantal ; Fenelon and Madame Guyon ; 
Madame Swetchine and Lacordaire ; Eugenie 
and Maurice de Guerin ; Madame Roland and 
the Girondists ; Hannah More and her mascu- 
line contemporaries, — all illustrate a type of 
friendships between men and women which has 
done all that a human relation could do to exalt 



MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI THE FRIEND. 83 

human nature and to embellish human life. 
For love, the most powerful passion of human- 
ity, is only exalted when it is born of friend- 
ship. The lover must be first and always the 
friend to be worthy to be the lover. To revere 
and love the individual, the personal essence 
which in its intrinsic quality separates the be- 
loved being from every other in the universe, 
is the only love which survives all time and 
change. It is the only love which outlives 
beauty and youth. It made even Abelard and 
Heloise friends long after they had ceased to be 
lovers. The charm to inspire it in man lives 
only in the rarest woman. It made the soul of 
Madame Recamier more beautiful than her face, 
and her face was among the most beautiful in 
the world. It made all her hopeless lovers live 
and die her friends. It makes the picture of 
herself and Chateaubriand, sitting by the same 
fireside in their last days, one of the most at- 
tractive in the history of human affection. The 
splendor of his power, the passion of his intel- 
lect were gone ; so too were the grace and glory 
of her youth. He was decrepit, she was blind, 
and both were old. They had outlived their 
friends, outlived everything which had once 
made their hves resplendent. The affection of 
their hearts, the friendship of their souls, sur- 



84 OUTLINES. 

viving youth, and passion, beauty and power, 
alone remained unshaken and unchanged. We 
pity the nature incapable of believing in this 
perfect friendship existing between man and 
woman. We find many such to pity. The 
majority of people talk as if there were but two 
extremes of relation which woman can sustain 
to man. She must be a pretty, tricky, artful 
creature, beguiling him of his reason, taking 
him captive through his senses, the panderer to 
his pleasures, at once his tjnrant and his slave ; 
or she must arm herself against him, accuse him, 
abuse him, as at once the sole author of her 
wrongs, the source of all her miseries. The fair, 
open land between, — the serene and sacred land 
of friendship, wherein men and women may meet 
in human sympathy, in kindred pursuits, in wide 
thoughts, and in beneficent action, — we hear 
constantly spoken of as a debatable if not im- 
possible meeting-ground. It doubtless is, for 
the people who express this opinion ; but never 
has been and never will be to those men and 
women who recognize and revere in each other 
the equal human nature which each alike re- 
ceives from God. Always man needs woman 
for his friend. He needs her clearer vision, her 
subtler insight, her swifter thought, her winged 
soul, her pure and tender heart. Always wo- 



MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI THE FRIEND. 85 

man needs man to be her friend. She needs 
the vigor of his purpose, the ardor of his will, 
his calmer judgment, his braver force of action, 
his reverence, and his devotion. Thus the 
mystic bond of sex which binds one half the 
matter and spirit of the universe in counterpart 
and balance to the other, gives even to the 
friendship of man and woman its jfinest charm, 
enabling each only through the other to pre- 
serve the perfect equipoise of intellect and soul. 
Such a friend was Margaret Fuller to the men 
who still speak her name with reverent tender- 
ness. To have been at once a personal impulse, 
an intellectual inspiration in the lives of such 
men as Freeman Clarke, Hedge, Alcott, Chan- 
ning, Emerson, George Ripley, Horace Gree- 
ley, Mazzini, was as high an individual privilege 
as ever came to an American woman. As the 
friend and helper of these men, her name will 
live associated with the most marked revolution 
in culture and ideas of her country and era. 
Without subscribing to their tenets, to be just, 
we must own that the transcendentalists of 
New England have given a keener impulse to 
thought (even in channels opposite to their 
own), a wider direction to personal culture, and 
a higher exaltation to personal character than 
has been given in the same period by any other 



86 OUTLINES. 

body of scholars and thinkers in America. 
And when their history is dispassionately writ- 
ten, as it will be some day, the central figure 
amid this group of large-brained men will be 
this large-brained and still larger hearted wo- 
man. William Henry Channing says of her : 
'' Of this body she was a member by grace of 
Nature. Her romantic freshness of heart, her 
craving for the truth, her discipline in German 
schools had given definite form and tendency 
to her ideahsm. On the other hand, very 
strong common sense saved her from being vis- 
ionary, while she was too well read as a scholar 
to be caught by conceits, and had been too 
sternly tried by sorrow to fall into fanciful ef- 
feminacy. Men — her superiors in years, fame, 
and social position — treated her with the frank- 
ness due from equal to equal, not with the half- 
condescending deference with which scholars are 
wont to adapt themselves to women. They 
prized her verdict, respected her criticism, feared 
her rebuke, and looked to her as an umpire. 
Very observable was it, also, how with her they 
seemed to glow and brighten into their best 
mood, and poured out in full measure what 
they had but scantily hinted at in the circle at 
large. In these conversations she blended in 
closest union and swift interplay feminine re- 



MARGARET FULLER OSSOLL THE FRIEND. 87 

ceptiyeness with masculine energy. She was 
at once impressible and creative, impulsive and 
deliberate, pliant in sympathy, yet firmly self- 
centered, confidingly responsive, while com- 
manding in originality. By the vivid intensity 
of her conceptions she brought out in those 
around her their own consciousness, and by the 
glowing vigor of her intellect roused into action 
their torpid powers. She Uved herself with 
such concentrated force in moments, that she 
was always effulgent with thought and affec- 
tion. So tender was her affection that, like a 
guardian genius, she made her friends' souls her 
own and identified herself with their fortunes." 
In closing his account of her life at Jamaica 
Plain, this same beloved friend, who had known 
her intimately from childhood, offers her as high 
a tribute as man ever paid to the friendship of 
woman : " The very thought of her roused 
manliness to emulate the vigorous freedom with 
which one was assured that, wherever placed, 
she was that instant acting, and the mere men- 
tion of her name was an inspiration of magnan- 
imity and faithfulness and truth." 



88 OUTLINES. 

THE T^'RITER. 

Margabet Fuller's written use of lan- 
guage was only limited when compared witli 
her comprehensive thought and eloquence of 
oral speech. When she used language to 
illustrate her scholarship she was its master. 
Her intellect was widely and keenly crit- 
ical; it traversed and measured universal life, 
equally the life of thought and the life of 
human experience. What she said of Goethe is 
preeminently true of herself. " She could see 
all that others live," but then she felt it also. 
When we remember that she brought this wide 
vision, this almost limitless culture, with all 
their opulence of suggestion and of illustration, 
to bear upon every character and work that 
she studied, we cease to wonder that in every 
critical line which she has left we perceive the 
touch of a master. In what language can be 
found another criticism of Goethe at once so 
intuitive, comprehensive, and critical, as hers, 
when judged by the severest standard of art ? 
It is neither a eulogy nor a rhapsody ; it is an 
exhaustive analysis. She measured not only his 
art, but the soul of his art ; not his work alone, 
but the many-sided being of its author. She 
gives us the whole of Goethe's character in a 



MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI THE WRITER. 89 

siligle sentence : " Naturally of a deep mind and 
shallow heart, he felt the sway of the affections 
enough to appreciate their workings in other 
men, but never enough to receive their regener- 
ating influence." And again : " Of Goethe, as 
of other natures where the intellect is too much 
developed in proportion to the moral nature, it 
is difficult to speak without seeming narrow, 
blind, and impertinent. For such men see all 
that others live ; and, if you feel the want of a 
faculty in them, it is hard to say that they have 
it not, lest next moment they puzzle you by 
some indications of it. Yet they are not, know 
not ; they only discern." Again: " Faust con- 
tains the great idea of his life ; as, indeed, there 
is but one great poetic idea possible to man — 
the progress of the soul through the various 
forms of existence." After a subtle analysis of 
each of his various works, in the last paragraph 
of this superb criticism she utters these last 
words for Goethe : " Let us, not in surveying 
his works and life, abide with him too much in 
the suburbs and outskirts of himself. Let us 
enter into his higher tendency, thank him for 
such angels as Iphigenia, whose simple truth 
mocks at all his wise Beschrankungen." 

The fields of critical literature offer rich har- 
vests to the intellect of women. To those en- 



90 OUTLINES. 

dowed with the power of comparison and of 
analysis, rather than the creative faculty, the 
largest opportunity waits. The printing-presses 
of the world throw off the embodied thought of 
the age faster than it can be read, faster than 
keen and accurately -balanced brains can weigh 
and judge between the chaff and the grain. 
Where in Margaret Fuller's time there was 
critical labor for one thoroughly-trained analytic 
mind there is now the labor and necessity for 
hundreds. But the extensive culture, the thor- 
ough mental discipline which enabled Margaret 
Fuller to command a leading position as critic 
of the greatest thinkers of the world, is just the 
discipline which the majority even of our most 
gifted women lack. It is not the want of native 
power, nor the want of opportunity, nor the en- 
vious prejudice of men, which debars women 
from the places of personal independence and 
influence which they covet, so much as it is their 
own lack of accurate knowledge, of faculties dis- 
ciplined to special uses. One born with the fac- 
ulty divine may write rhymes and romance, if 
one only knows the alphabet ; one may do no 
small amount of showy and shammy work with 
just a smattering of lore ; one may play brill- 
iantly with things in general, without knowing 
anything in particular ; but there is a vantage 



MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI THE WRITER. 91 

ground of thought as well as of action, which no 
mere show can reach, before which all shams fail. 
In the highest degree to weigh, measure, com- 
pare, analyze, and judge, involves not only the 
natural power to do it, but a long discipline and 
preparation of that power for its finest use. 
The total lack of such discipline is the most dis- 
tinguished fact in the average education of wo- 
men. The numbers and names of their studies 
are appalling. They know a little of many 
things — nothing accurately or thoroughly. 
How many women, called accomplished, who, 
if orphaned or widowed, are totally unable to 
earn a Hvelihood by instructing others in any 
branch of knowledge which they have been 
superficially taught. They are sure of nothing 
that they have studied. They possess no knowl- 
edge which they can make available; not a 
single power trained to use, not a mental gift 
which can command in gold an equivalent for 
its service. Thus through their very training 
inferior men are constantly taking the prece- 
dence of superior women. However little a man 
may know, he is usually sure of what he does 
know. His power, if limited, is at least avail- 
able ; and for success it is better to be able to 
do one thing perfectly than a thousand indiffer- 
ently. How many bright women we know 



92 OUTLINES. 

who are earning their bread in subordinate 
or menial positions solely through the want 
of the mental training which, did they pos- 
sess it, would bear them at once to higher 
and better places. How many dull men we 
know full of authority, influence, and money, 
solely because their rather scanty powers were 
trained to special use ; because they used them 
steadfastly for a definite purpose. Positions of 
responsibility and influence are constantly open- 
ing to women who are fitted to fill them. A 
few men maybe envious and jealous about it — 
that is human nature ; but even now there is 
nothing in their envy or jealousy which can- 
prevent a woman from commanding the position 
which she has fitted herself honorably to fill. 
Then would it not be more effective if the lead- 
ers who devote themselves to the interests of wo- 
men should spend a little less time in lecturing 
men, and a good deal more in the special training 
of their daughters ? It is too late to atone for the 
superficial education or the lack of education in 
the women of the present generation, who are 
already weighted with all the burdens of mature 
life. But it is the hour to train the woman of 
the coming generation ; to educate her for the 
largest use of her faculties ; to give her that 
special training, in whatever direction she shows 



MARGARET FULLER OS SOLI THE WRITER. 93 

the most talent, which will make her mistress 
of at least one of the arts of the world, which in 
any emergency will enable her to be a self- 
respecting, self-supporting being. Let her be 
trained as her brother is trained, with a reserved 
power to meet the vicissitudes of life. Then, if 
she escapes, she is but the richer ; and, if not, 
she may rejoice no less in the exceeding great 
reward of faculties trained to noble service. 
For such we commend Margaret Fuller as the 
most illustrious example of scholarship in woman 
which our country has yet given the world. 
Not that we should not be sorry to see the girl 
of our period writing Latin poems at eight years 
of age, or digging out Greek roots before break- 
fast, or in any way teaching her brain at the 
expense of her digestion. This is not necessary. 
In Margaret Fuller's early days it was supposed 
that the head condescended to no relationship 
with the stomach. We know better. We know 
that there cannot be a healthy brain without a 
healthy stomach, and that physical culture must 
keep pace with all intellectual development. 
But the unthinking prejudice against high 
scholarship in woman has been, not that it 
injured her stomach, but that in some very 
unphysiological way it repressed her heart. 
Nonsense ! A man may be a scholar or a 



94 OUTLINES, 

thinker ; lie is no less manly, it don't hurt his 
heart. A woman because she studies and thinks 
is no less a human being ; but the onore^ in 
the proportion which her whole nature grows. 
Thus Margaret Fuller, illustrious as scholar and 
thinker, is no less preeminent as a daughter, sis- 
ter, wife, and mother. Her heart, as capacious as 
her mind, compassed the fullness and sweetness 
of every human relation. Thus in the double 
perfect meaning we hold up her name as that 
of the grand typical woman of our country and 
time. 



IX. 

A FRENCH JOURNALIST. 

MADAME GUIZOT. 

The woman journalist is not tlie outgrowth 
of our own land and generation alone. In other 
times and countries women have been associ- 
ated with the press who might have been illus- 
trious had not prejudice forbidden it. That 
same prejudice robbed it of many others whose 
special gifts would have added lustre to its 
triumphs. It was the caste of sex which held 
these gifts within the narrow limit of personal 
correspondence ; even here, in at least two 
instances, they have grown to be a supreme 
inheritance to the realm of letters. Think what 
journalists Madame De Sevigne and Lady Mary 
Wortley Montague would have made ! The 
genius of the woman whose name is recorded 
above was of a much more- severe and lofty 
type. Madame Guizot was the youngest of 
that sober school of moralists which began with 
La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyere, and which 
included Vauvenargues and Duclos. She was 
born Pauline de Meulons, in Paris, 1773. Her 
father was the receiver-general for the district 



96 OUTLINES. 

of Paris and tlie possessor of a large fortune. 
Her mother was of an ancient family in P^ri- 
gord, which had been represented in the Cru- 
sades. Amid affluence and the most refined 
surrounding the little Pauhne grew up a deli- 
cate and thoughtful child. She was seven years 
younger than Madame De Stael ; and the for- 
cing and repressing process which distorted the 
mental and spiritual deyelopment of that highly- 
endowed woman in early youth were un- 
known to the childhood and girlhood of Pauline 
de Meulons. Also unknown to her were the 
precocious ambition for display and the un- 
healthy sensibility which marred the character 
and happiness of her more brilliant friend. In 
her extreme youth Pauline de Meulons felt the 
shock of the Revolution of '87 and '89. Its 
frightful spectacles shocked her sense of justice, 
saddened her heart, and destroyed her youth ; 
while it quickened all her faculties, made more 
powerful a mind naturally strong, critical, in- 
cisive, sensitive, and distinctively keen in its 
perception of truth and its hatred of falsehood. 
In 1790 her father died in poverty. While 
surveying a fortune of milUons lost in debt, and 
her own mother reduced to absolute want, her 
moral force and natural energy sprang to the 
rescue, and tears fell from her eyes when, for the 



A FRENCH JOURNALIST. 97 

first time in her life, it occurred to her that she 
might possess mental resources upon which she 
could draw to retrieve the one and support the 
other. She read slowly, she studied faithfully, 
she perfected herself in the- use of the English 
language. To begin, she wrote a novel, of 
course. But truth, not fancy, was the essence 
of her intellectual quality. She was born with 
the faculty of acute, ahnost unerring observa- 
tion. She was keenly sensitive to everything 
weak, absurd, or false. She had creative 
power ; but it subserved her analytical and 
critical force. By natural endovmient she was 
born a journahst. 

In 1801, M. Suard estabhshed the " Publi- 
ciste." It discussed politics, religion, literature, 
and ideology, and was the keen foe of the 
'' Journal des D^bats." At first, through the 
friendship of M. Suard, the " Publiciste " was 
opened to Mile. De Meulons. For nearly ten 
years she contributed to its columns regularly 
upon every topic within its range — ethics, so- 
ciety, literature, the drama, novels, etc. She 
even maintained sharp controversies with her- 
self, under an assumed character, attacking and 
defending lierseK with great acumen upon many 
of the exciting themes which then agitated the 
leading intellects of France. The two volumes 
7 



98 OUTLINES. 

of her " Conseils de Morale " are composed 
almost exclusively of extracts made from these 
ten years' contributions. Of some of these 
Madame De Stael wrote to M. Suard : '' Pray 
tell me if Mile. De Meulons is the author of the 
frptgment on Vauvenargues, on Thibet, the 
Enghsh, etc. ? They so far transcend the ordi- 
nary efforts even of a gifted woman that I fan- 
cied I detected your hand in the composition." 

Mile. De Meulons herself, speaking of the 
logical faculty in Borleau, says : ''In him it 
was a delicate, sensitive, irritable organ, wounded 
by a false sense, as a fine ear is wounded by a 
false note, and rising in its wrath the moment 
it received a shock ; " and Sainte-Beuve adds : 
'' This same vivacity and vigilance of reasoning 
Mile. De Meulons displayed during the singu- 
larly active period of her journalistic career." 
Like Madame De Condorcet, Madame Roland, 
and many other celebrated French writers .and 
thinkers of the eighteenth century, she reflected 
the Latin mind through a loving study of its 
masters. Sainte-Beuve says of her : " She had 
something in common with Seneca — she touched 
antiquity through the most modern of the 
ancients." Like Seneca, she delighted to pre- 
sent truth in the guise of paradox. She was 
great in aphorisms. Many of the most profound, 



A FRENCH JOURNALIST. 99 

whicli have given her moral counsels a perma- 
nent place in literature, were gathered like un- 
wrouglit gems from a great mine of miscellane- 
ous articles. The most precious and permanent 
were often found in some review of a silly 
novel or insipid play ; but she left the mark of 
greatness upon everything that she touched. 
And it was not the one-sided greatness of mere 
mental power ; it was greatness of character, as 
well. At twenty-five she found herself over- 
whelmed with domestic embarrassments. A 
fortune of several millions laid in ruins. Upon 
this, by her own unaided labors, she met all 
claims, reserving nothing for herself but free- 
dom from debt, earning day by day her own 
support and her mother's. Through all these 
ten years she sowed the most precious seed of 
her thought and life — seed whose still-ripening 
harvest is not yet all gathered in — seed sown in 
humility, obscurity, and need, in the apparently 
ephemeral soil of a Parisian newspaper. Then, 
as to-day, the world did not lack croakers to 
decry a woman's work ; nor the Job-friends, of 
whom all workers possess so many, who bemoan 
that, if you have gifts, you must '' waste them 
on a newspaper." Above all this " venomous 
compassion " she rose, as every great woman 
should rise to-day, into a region of thought and 



100 OUTLINES. 

action where it cannot touch her. She replied 
once, in her '' Letter of a Female Journalist to 
a Friend," published December 18th, 1807 : 
" My articles are censured, are they, my friend ? 
That, of course, is to their credit ; but you tell 
me the censure extends to me personally — to 
the stand I have taken as contributor to a jour- 
nal, and especially as a critic of theatrical novel- 
ties. I am reproached, therefore, with being a 
woman, not surely with being a journalist ; for 
those of my censors who know me know very 
well why I am that. But do they not fear that 
they may have wherewith to reproach them- 
selves, if by words lightly uttered they succeed 
in destroying, or, at least, in rendering more 
difficult of exercise, the courage found requisite 
for the sacrifice to whajt I considered a duty 
of the conventionalities which my education and 
habits had taught me to respect. I know 
them, my friend, and so do you — these conven- 
tionalities, which make the role of a journalist 
the very oddest for a woman to choose, if, 
indeed, it ever were adopted from choice. It 
cannot, I assure you, appear as ridiculous to 
these friends of yours as to me ; for they have 
never seen it so near. If they knew, as well as 
I, the grave interests at stake, the important 
considerations to be weighed, the absurd griefs 



A FRENCH JOURNALIST. 101 

to be consoled, and the still more absurd hom- 
age to be accepted ; the buzz of petty passions, 
whose noise invades a woman's very solitude ; 
and if they could see, amid all this, a work to 
be done without charm for the mind, or indem- 
nification for the vanity, then they might say 
what they thought, and think, if they pleased, 
that I had undertaken this work for my own 
pleasure. But let them not attempt to pity me, 
for that would be as unreasonable as to blame." 

One must pause before the simple dignity of 
these words, so penetrated with the ideas of 
duty and responsibility, as they recall the frivo- 
lous assertion so frequently and so flippantly 
made, that women enter every calling, especially 
that of journalism, without preparation, without 
forethought, without power, chiefly to gratify a 
" hankering after notoriety or public applause." 

In 1807 Mile. De Muelons, through fresh 
domestic misfortune and impaired health, was 
compelled to discontinue her journalistic labors 
for a season. At this time she received a letter 
written by an unknown hand, containing an offer 
from the writer to supply articles for the " Pub- 
liciste " in her place, which he would attempt 
to make worthy of her as long as her own were 
interrupted. After hesitation this offer was 
accepted. And for months M. Guizot — then 



102 OUTLINES, 

yery young and perfectly obscure — supplied to 
the " Publiciste " miscellaneous, dramatic, and 
literary criticisms in place of the ones that had 
made the journal illustrious under the signa- 
ture of P. Thus the after great historian and 
statesman of France began his life of letters by 
doing the work of a woman, to him personally 
unkno^yn, under her own signature. Personal 
acquaintance created a bond* between these two, 
more powerful than age or conflicting opinion, 
lasting as life, and not dissolv^ed in death. In 
1812 they were married, and in mature life 
Pauline de Meulons begins a new career. The 
journalist is not lost, but merged in the com- 
pleter woman. She was not defrauded of youth 
at last, though it came to her somewhat past its 
season, as it must to many. She who at twenty- 
fiye wrote with the wisdom of age, at thirty- 
nine wrote with the glow of youth warming 
eyery conyiction. In the study of an intellect- 
ual woman nothing is more interesting than to 
trace the change wrought in her intellectual life 
and labor through the perfect deyelopment of 
her womanhood. In almost every instance it is 
sufficient to yerify the belief that the great un- 
derlying motiye force of the uniyerse is that of 
sex. The greatest feminine writer can neyer 
be a woman w^ho has stopped short of the com- 



A FRENCH JOURNALIST. 103 

plete fulfillment of womanhood. Thus, after 
more than ten years of intellectual work, which 
would have reflected lustre upon the greatest 
man, there came a time when the woman herself 
was greater than the utmost that she had ever 
done. As the grandest men are the most sim- 
ple and childlike, so the grandest women are 
the most womanly. If by reason of intellectual 
power they are stronger than the mass, by so 
much are they more powerful in every attribute 
essentially feminine. The great man is never 
so great to us as when we feel his grandeur 
through the spontaneous revealing of a child- 
like soul ; and an intellectual woman never so 
potent as when we feel the magnetism of her 
genius through the greatness of her heart. 
Thus of the illustrious woman whose public 
career is here so partially sketched it can truly 
be said that her latest j^ears were her greatest. 
Under the stress of necessity her intellect flow- 
ered first ; later, in the holy atmosphere of 
affection, her heart. In 1806 she wrote : " A 
woman who has reached the end of youth must 
not suppose that she has any further concern 
with passion — not even with vanquishing it. 
Her strength must henceforth lie in calm, and 
not in courage." 

Six years later, when she had done with 



104 OUTLINES. 

youth, she loved and married a man intellect- 
ually and spiritually her peer. She lived to 
look into the face of her child ; then life and 
the whole universe took on a value unknown 
before. She became the writer of a new age. 
The mother of a man, there dawned in her an 
absolute perception of harmony and duty, of 
faith and truth, of liberty and law, but dimly 
guessed at in her maidenhood. '' Once a mother, 
she felt the necessity of believing in a better 
future and a perfectible humanity in the virtue 
of those generations that would be contempo- 
rary with her child." She wrote books for 
children, she espoused the labors and convictions 
of her eminent husband. She loved love, and 
she loved to live. She, calm reasoner, — looking 
into the face of husband and child, then into 
the face of death, — felt a yearning and a re- 
gret for which there was no speech. Into her 
last hours were gathered a passion and a pathos 
which youth never brought. 

On the 1st of August, 1827, while her 
husband was reading to her a sermon of Bos- 
suet, on the Immortality of the Soul, she passed 
from earth, and was buried, by her own desire, 
according to the rites of the Reformed Church, 
of which her husband was a member. 

Sainte-Beuve says of her : " Thus died a 



A FRENCH JOURNALIST. 105 

woman who has had no superior in our genera- 
tion. The sentiment which she inspires is such 
as can only be expressed in terms of respectful 
admiration ; such that it seems almost a sin 
against one who was always intent upon beings 
rather than seeming^ to pronounce on her behalf 
the words future or glory T 



X. 

FANNY TERN. 

Sara Payson Willis Pakton (Fanny Fern) 
died October lOtli, 1872. Mr. Bonner, in the 
New York "' Ledger," noticing her dangerous ill- 
ness, which he said '' will carry immeasurable 
sorrow to the hearts of our readers," added : 
'' The following is the first article that Fanny 
Fern ever wrote for the ' Ledger.' It was pub- 
lished in the 'Ledger' of January 5th, 1856 — 
over sixteen years ago. Since that day she has 
never failed once to furnish an article for every 
number of the ' Ledger.' We think no other 
editor can say this of any contributor for the 
same period of time." 

In 1851 Fanny Fern found herself a widow 
with two Uttle girls clinging to her for support 
as well as care. In 1851 it must have been 
harder for a woman to suddenly find herself 
confronting the world, with only her brain and 
hands and loving heart between her and want. 
It is appalling enough now for any woman 
accustomed to life-long dependence to suddenly 
find all the responsibihties of bread-wimiing 



FANNY FERN. 107 

and household support devolving on her own 
unaided labor, although manifold opportunities 
for that labor were undreamed of twenty years 
ago. At that time the best educated of Ameri- 
can women were educated for nothing in par- 
ticular — unless to be school teachers, which, 
of course, created, at least, a dozen teachers for 
every school. But death and misfortune have 
ever been remorselessly indifferent to the fancies 
of the fastidious or to the prejudices of society. 
In the abstract, lovely is the theory that a 
woman should always be protected, always cared 
for. But all the same as if they were nev^r 
uttered, every day death strikes down the pro- 
tector, or fatal conditions put him forever beyond 
reach. Then, in the face of the finest theory, 
woe to the woman standing alone who cannot 
honorably take care of herself. 

Fanny Fern, as a school girl in Catherine 
Beecher's seminary, in Hartford, tore the leaves 
out of her " Euclid " to curl her hair with. 
Hartford still holds traditions of her girlish 
escapades, tricks, and manners, but has pre- 
served no record of her scholarship. In her 
way, she probably was about the same sort of 
scholar in the Hartford Seminary that Henry 
Ward Beecher was in Amherst College, — 
learning as little as possible from books, but 



108 OUTLINES, 

everything from Nature, from human beings, 
from her own acute faculties, electrical tempera- 
ment, and deep, passionate heart. What it 
was for such an one to find herself suddenly- 
cast forth from a home of ease, a life of loye 
and happiness — widowed and poor — no one 
may tell but she who has sat down amid the 
ashes of all earthly joy. To-day the world is 
not over-kind to lonely womanhood. Least of 
all is it to a womanhood so sharply defined in 
its originahty or individuality that the very 
force of its innate quality pushes it out of the 
accustomed groove assigned to average woman- 
hood. All that Fanny Fern suffered in those 
early days of womanhood, none but God and 
her own soul could ever know. It does not 
follow that her ''friends," as worldly friends 
go, were basely cruel beyond their kind, if they 
did neglect, pass by, and shght the young 
widow — proud, independent, poor, who to them 
besides was probably erratic, hard to manage, 
and '' queer." Nor does it prove that hers was 
a malicious nature, because under its first keen 
sense of neglect and injury, the passionate heart 
in its need, the proud spirit in its poverty, flung 
back in return resentment and defiance, bitter- 
ness and even hate. It was a transient disturb- 
ance. It was the stress of misfortune, the 



FANNY FERN 109 

stirring of wrong, which wrought up the wrath 
of her nature. She tossed off the foam of her 
rage, leaving the pure wine below her, clear, 
bright, effervescing. Thus she poured it out 
in fullness and sweetness to the last. 

Well, she did not want to go into a shop. 
She could not teach school and live by it ; but 
she could write an essay that was yet a sketch 
— dancing, dashing, satirical, witty, human, 
pathetic — a sketch which in that day, at least, 
was a need in journalism ; a sketch for which 
she alone in temperament and power had re- 
ceived the patent ; a sketch which nobody else 
on earth could write but Fanny Fern. She 
wrote it. With poverty crouching on the 
hearth, with her little girls tugging at her 
skirts, with her fiery blood rushing through 
her veins, all freighted with love of love and 
hate of hate, she wrote it. Then she put it 
into a little satchel, and sallied forth to sell 
it. That must have been awful. There was 
a relief in Avriting it. What a delicious first 
vent it must have been for the flood-tide of 
wrath and love that came rushing after. But 
to go out to seek somebody else to find it pre- 
cious — precious enough to pay money for it ; 
to set a price on it ; that heart-throb, to ask 
a price for it — that must have been awful. A 



110 OUTLINES. 

man going from office to office to sell a poem 
or a leader must be a sorry sight. A woman 
compelled to peddle by voice and eye such a 
ware must be a sadder sight still. She endured 
many a supercilious glance, more than one re- 
buff, of course, on her weary round. A woman 
trying to sell her own composition from a bag, 
no doubt appeared childish to these men of 
affairs. The curly head, the little satchel, the 
little sketch, did not look the least like business. 
Beholding the three, what prophet of them all 
could foresee that the dainty reticule with its 
contents stood for one hundred and thirty-two 
thousand copies of a single book ! She found 
an astute purchaser at last. He liked the sketch, 
took it, and paid her for it — fifty cents. 

Its fresh fearlessness hit the " general read- 
er ; " its yeining pathos touched ten thousand 
hearts. Fanny Fern had hit the right nail on 
the head ; it was a golden one. She struck 
again and yet again, for twenty years — for six- 
teen years never missing a single week. She 
was fortunate in her publisher. Sagacious and 
practical, she selected one not for his own fame, 
who would consider it quite sufficient to stamp 
his name on its title-page, and leave her book 
to take its chance ; bi}t one whose reputation 
would, in a degree, depend upon her own. Al- 



FANNY FERN. Ill 

ready her " Fern Leaves " were scattered 
through the length of the land. People shrugged 
their shoulders ; but all the more they read 
and bought. Critics said they were flippant, 
sarcastic, irreverent, masculine, and bitter. 
Nobody said they were lackadaisical, weak, 
or stupid. No matter what was said, all the 
more people bought them and read them. Of 
the first volume of " Fern Leaves " seventy 
thousand copies were sold in America. " Little 
Ferns for Fanny's Little Friends," sold sixty- 
two thousand in the United States, while forty- 
eight thousand copies were sold in England 
alone. 

In touching child-life, as in nothing else, did 
Fanny Fern prove the depth and tenderness of 
her true womanhood. She might be unjust to 
men, satirical to women ; but to a baby — no 
matter how sour or woebegone — she was never 
less than the mother. From first to last she 
was the championess of childhood. Not a tor- 
ment, not a stomach-ache, not a delight could 
come to a child, or ever came to one, of which 
she has not taken cognizance. It has no possi- 
ble right that she did not defend, no error that 
she did not tenderly forgive, no sorrow with 
which she did not sympathize. With children, 
so with mothers. Her own motherhood was the 



112 OUTLINES. 

deepest and sweetest inspiration of her being. 
Through her own mother-hfe she felt that of 
all mothers. To the world at large Faimy 
Fern may be a fierce hater of shams, a brusque, 
masculine, and even naughty woman. To the 
mother who has watched her child sicken and 
die, who has buried the baby out of her bosom, 
and cut Fanny Fern's loving grief over just such 
a baby out of a newspaper, and hidden it in her 
work-basket — to this mother (and I see her in 
so many lonely homes) Fanny Fern is the most 
lovesome of all mortal beings. 

Broadway has given me two pictures of this 
woman, which I shall always tenderly keep. 
One is of the winter of 1859-60. Each bright 
day one could see from afar that haughty head, 
with its wealth of golden curls, and that peer- 
less step, which had in it a fine disdain, that 
I never saw equaled in woman. Always qui- 
etly and elegantly dressed, she was striking by 
force of her very presence. With strongly 
marked features, a noble figure, and elastic 
step, which yet carried with it the proud dig- 
nity of a queen, she could not fail to attract a 
second glance even from an unthinking stranger. 
On either side walked a fair young daughter. 
One, much taller than her mother, was espe- 
cially noticeable for her wide blue eyes and 



^^ 



FANNY FERN. 113 

long, fair curls. Within two or three years 
she married and died, leaving, as a dying gift 
to the mother whose heart was broken, a little 
child of her own. 

In time Broadway gave another characteris- 
tic picture of Fanny Fern. In the bright au- 
tumnal afternoon she walked Broadway with 
the young daughter left, and the baby. Thus 
I saw it one day in its nurse's arms. The 
crowd wedged us all pat in a corner. Fanny 
Fern was talking with baby. Obhvious of all 
the world, she saw her kingdom in its eyes. 
Such a transfigured face, such baby talk ! The 
direst Calvinist could not despair of the '' final 
salvation " of a woman who could look and talk 
like that to a baby. It was of this child that 
she wrote privately : " Our little Effie has 
never been left with a servant ; and, although 
to carry out such a plan has involved a sacri- 
fice of much literary work, or its unsatisfactory 
incompleteness, I am not, and never shall be,- 
sorry. She is my poem." 

As a writer she never reached her own high- 
est mark, never wrote up to the highest level 
of her powers. A passion for truth, a hatred 
of shams, a contempt for pretense, slashed with 
satire, sarcasm, humor, and wit, all electrified 
by an abounding vitahty and an exuberant 
8 



114 OUTLINES. 

loye of miscliief and fun, marked every utter- 
ance which she committed to print. Yet 
scarcely less was everything that she wrote 
veined with a deep, loving pity for human na- 
ture, a delight in the natural world, of which 
she was a happy interpreter. One could not 
read the slighest sketch from her hand without 
being conscious that it came from a strong and 
honest heart, and from a head of unexhausted 
power. Yet the conditions under which she 
wrote, made it impossible that she should con- 
centrate, elaborate, be continuously an artist, 
although m one form of utterance she was ever 
unapproached. -It was her lot, as it is the lot of 
so many of the brave, bright, men and women 
of this generation, to serve her day, to meet 
the exigencies of the hour, to say the word that 
the present demanded without reference to the 
future. And she was true woman enough to 
recognize the fact, and to modulate her life 
upon it, that to he is higher than to say, even 
though your word be said in a form of the finest 
art ; and that to mould an immortal soul is the 
divinest work that can come to woman or man. 
This sketch is not written to invade the sanc- 
tity of private grief or to pronounce judgment 
upon its subject, either as woman or writer. 
It is only an unstudied tribute to a represen- 



FANNY FERN. 115 

tative woman, wlio was one of the earliest to 
prove to American women that an honorable 
independence is within the reach of all who 
bring to bear upon any avocation to which they 
are adapted the industry, the faithfulness, the 
fearlesness, which characterized her ; a word of 
tender regret for one whose bright exuberance 
of life it has ever seemed could never go out ; 
a woman who, whatever her missteps were in 
struggling upward to its holiest standard, al- 
ways, through all her days, loved the religion 
of Jesus Christ, and loved little children. 



XI. 

HORACE GKEELEY AND EDWIN FOKKEST. 

Certainly no two men living were more 
thoroughly known in every phase of their being 
to their countrj^men than were Horace Greeley 
and Edwin Forrest. Each in his own way per- 
petually pubHshed himself. Each in distinc- 
tive spheres of art illustrated the highest order 
of talent of its kind. Each exemplified in his 
daily walk and conversation opposing types of 
manhood. Each in dying illustrated the law of 
his whole existence. In death, the whole picture 
of each life was seen in epitome. In life, the 
success of each man was self-made This fact 
aflfected each man according to his nature. It 
made Mr. Greeley feel superior to all colleges, 
and to all that colleges could bestow. It made 
Mr. Forrest feel superior to all other men. Ed- 
win Forrest loved a few men. Horace Greeley 
was devoted to mankind. Forrest applied all 
his vast energies to the delineation of art and 
the gratification of himself. Greeley performed 
gigantic labors in behalf of ideas, consumed with- 



HORA CE GREELEY AND ED WIN FORREST. 117 

out stint every faculty and power he possessed 
in the service of humanity. The centre of one 
man's hfe, of his love and longing and labor, 
was himself. The centre toward which the 
other tended, through all yearning and effort, 
was the upbuilding of human nature. This self- 
centraUzation and this superiority to self -gratifi- 
cation each man illustrated in every phase of his 
life and of himself. Nowhere was it seen more 
distiifctively or contrastingly than in their social 
and domestic existence. Horace Greeley clung 
to his wife through all fates and trials. An 
organism too acutely strung to bear life's com- 
mon ills without friction, pecuhar theories of 
domestic economy, with prolonged years of ill 
health, made it impossible, at times, that she 
should make the home of her overladen hus- 
band all that he needed. There were years, and 
these the ones in which his toils pressed heav- 
iest, when, through stress of circumstances, Mr. 
Greeley scarcely had a home. Some of his 
books were written amid discouragements and 
in discomfort which would have appalled and 
paralyzed any man less a Cato in his mould. 
Many homes, bright, genial, full of gentle hearts, 
opened to him ; but they were not his own. 

Women gifted, good, and beautiful trusted 
him, cared for him, and ministered in many 



118 OUTLINES, 

ways to his weary life. No man could have felt 
more exquisitely than he the ministries of such 
souls. No woman ever was his personal friend, 
trusting him, caring for him, who was not 
helped by the word and deed of his compan- 
ionship toward the truest and noblest woman- 
hood. No praise higher than this can woman 
offer to the memory of man. His friendships 
were catholic, comprehensive, and abiding. 
They held within their steadfast range some of 
the most illustrious as well as some of the most 
purely and sweetly domestic women of his time. 
Amid these, while his wife afar vainly pursued 
the mirage of health, he stood, in fact, a home- 
less and solitary man. But he never faltered in 
his work. He never swerved in his allegiance. 
He loved one woman, was true to her. She was 
the wife of his youth and the mother of his 
children. When her last struggle came, as he 
said, " in the darkest hour ; " when for thirty 
sleepless nights and days he watched the last 
earthly light go out in the lustrous eyes which 
had enchanted and enchained his heart for more 
than thirty years, he felt his own life wane 
with it ; and when it had gone, he knew had 
gone also both his power and his desire to live. 

In the fuUness of his fame, in 'the prime of 
his powers, and in the flower of a masculine 



EORA CE GREELEY AND ED WIN FORREST. 119 

beauty rarely bestowed upon man, Edwin For- 
rest, while the lion of the most exclusive Lon- 
don society, married Catherine Norton Sinclair, 
an Englishwoman, famous also for her beauty 
and her gifts. The marriage predicted before 
he left America, begun with such cloudless au- 
guries, ended in a disgrace and wretchedness 
never transcended. Husband and wife became 
unreconcilable foes. Yet all records bear wit- 
ness that they begun their life in New York 
with every prospect of happiness. Their house 
was a centre of fashionable, hterary, and artistic 
society. Perhaps they were not worthy of the 
rich estate to which they had been called, too 
unclean for the holy sacrament to which he was 
ordained sole priest and she sole priestess. One, 
at least, was. He had received sole homage so 
long he would not share it now — least of all 
with his wife. She attracted admiration on her 
own behalf. This he would not endure. Claim- 
ing and practicing all license himself, he de- 
manded of her the virtue which he outraged. She* 
may have been a sinner, or may not. I know 
nothing about it. But the world knows that 
the crimes of which he accused her had made 
his own life a shame. He accused his wife of 
the vice which had made his own career noto- 
rious, and then proceeded to punish her with 



120 OUTLINES. 

ruthless cruelty which alienated from him for- 
ever the sympathies of the better portion of 
mankind. It was not because Edwin Forrest 
was separated, or even divorced from his wife, 
that made his after days so isolated ; but be- 
cause he never ceased to his last day to perse- 
cute with malignant cruelty the woman whom 
he had sworn that he would love and cherish. 
Had like punishment been meted to him ac- 
cording to his sins, what would have been his 
fate? It was his wife who procured the di- 
vorce, forfeiting none of her rights or honors ; 
and from that hour he never devoted half the 
genius to the delineation of Shakespeare that 
he did to the subterfuges that he hoped would 
save him from the payment of her alimony. 
Thus it came to pass that for years and years 
he Kved on in the great mansion in Philadel- 
phia not only a sohtary, but a desolate man. 
Amid more wealth than he could ever consume, 
amid books and statues and pictures — exqui- 
site pictures of child-life — he was alone. - In 
his home hung the picture of two little chil- 
dren ; one bathing her naked feet in a brook — 
the other stepping out of it with the sunlight 
on her head. It is told of this man how for 
hours he would shut himself away, gazing upon 
this picture. He had wealth and fame and 



HORA CE GREELE Y AND ED WIN FORREST. 121 

many honors. But no child bore his name 
like a crown. No child-voice rained its music 
through those lonely halls. No soul is so ut- 
terly alone as that one who nurses in silence 
and secret a soUtary passion, be it of love or 
hate. Self-love and wife-hate, developed into 
brooding and abiding passions, separated Ed- 
* win Forrest from the brotherhood of man and 
the true fellowship of pure women. No person 
who ever heard him utter the tenderest pas- 
sages of Othello, of Hamlet, or of Lear can 
doubt his latent capacity to feel the deepest and 
tenderest emotions of the human heart. He 
comprehended beauty, sweetness, goodness, at 
times even moral greatness. He loved pure 
and tender ideals; but not with the abiding 
love, with the overmastering force which could 
hold his stormy passions in abeyance. Yet 
this comprehension, this capacity made more 
keen in him the consciousness of all that he had 
missed and all that he had lost. They deep- 
ened his solitude. They gave intensity to his 
sense of isolation and to his misery. As he 
lived, so he died — alone. How the iron soul 
met the supreme messenger no soul may tell. 
There was no one to seek the silent chamber 
but a faithful servant. She waited long to hear 
the heavy step on the solitary stair ; and when 



122 OUTLINES. 

he came not, and she went to him, she found 
that he had already met his fate. While dress- 
ing, to begin the life of another day, the hand 
forgot its cunning, the haughty head bowed to 
its first and last conqueror, the soul of a master 
void of tender glance or loving farewell or re- 
prieve of warning struck out into the unknown. 
What a contrast to the death hour of his great *' 
contemporary. Death had robbed him before, 
how keenly and closely. His dearest hope, his 
life-long love had passed before him within the 
vail. The final blow that smote him struck the 
heart of the nation. It paused to lament its 
friend. His foes forgot his foibles. His carica- 
turists spoke only of his virtues. The daughters 
who loved him to idolatrj^ hung upon his dying 
breath, and the friend whose sacred affection 
had followed and served him for more than 
forty years received his last glance of recogni- 
tion in tender farewell,^^as soul and body parted 
forever. " I know that my Redeemer liveth," 
was his first conscious exclamation as his soul 
came back from the eclipse which precluded its 
eternal morning. More than twenty years be- 
fore, in the yearning of his first great grief, 
when '' Pickie " died, he wrote : '' Now all that 
deeply concerns me is the evidence that we 
shall live hereafter ; and especially that we shall 



HORA CE GREELE Y AND ED WIN FORREST. 123 

Kve with and know those we loved here." 
Through storm and conflict and wounds unprec- 
edented, the divine assurance was his. He 
uttered it in the moments of final passage. 
Who may measure the sublime satisfaction, the 
utter content born of that divine verity, healer 
of all mortal wounds, last, best hope of immor- 
tality ! We who Hve know how attractive and 
enchanting this world is. They who die alone 
are sure that for its broken promises there can 
be no fulfillment, no, nor recompense, save in 
the full fruitions of an hereafter. 

Every human life teaches one supreme les- 
son. That of Edwin Forrest is that no man, 
no matter how vast his resources or endow- 
ments, is sufficient unto himself. While in the 
life and death of Horace Greeley we are made 
equally sure that the man who through his 
own being yet lives for mankind, whatever his 
weaknesses, will survive in the heart of the 
humanity which he served ; and, whatever his 
defeats, that he will find in death his final rec- 
ompense and finest triumph. 



xn. 

LOLA MONTEZ. 

Lola Montez delivered her first lecture 
after her last return from Europe in Mozart 
Hall, New York City. Whether the story of 
Lola's conversion brought them together to 
see the " change," or if it were simply the 
magnetism of the brilliant and naughty coun- 
tess herself, I'm sure I don't know, but a more 
refined and intelligent looking audience seldom 
greets a metropolitan lecturer. Lola appeared, 
looking as radiant as her beautiful portrait, 
hung out on Broadway, and quite as young. 
Those who expected to behold a passe woman, 
whom they had heard of ever since they were 
babies, a nervous skeleton of buried charms, 
were astonished to see her, on the brilliant ros- 
trum of Mozart Hall, looking not a day more 
than twenty-five. This wonderful preservation 
of youth may be attributed to a young, elastic 
heart, which, in spite of time, the tear of travel, 
and a thousand tornadoes of passion, revels in a 
perpetual spring ; but quite as likely owed some 



LOLA MONTEZ. 125 

of its perfection to sundry pastes and powders, 
the famous receipts of which Lola published 
for the benefit of the whole civilized feminine 
world. The hthe grace of her form was dis- 
played to advantage in its voluminous garb 
of black velvet; a lace collar encircled the 
throat ; cobweb laces fell over the arms, and 
a pocket handkerchief of the same fascinating 
fabric, floated in one delicate hand. She wore 
no jewelry, not even a breastpin or ring, — a 
bouquet of natural flowers being her only orna- 
ment. In an aesthetic point of view, it was 
worth more than the admittance fee simply to 
look at so complete a specimen of nature and 
art, without once thinking that you saw^'in her 
the beautiful woman of the nineteenth century, 
whose name in coming history (whether justly 
or unjustly) will be coupled with those of Pom- 
padour, De Maintenon and others of their class. 
But when the great blue eyes grew scintillant 
with smiles, and the electric voice in most ex- 
quisite intonations vibrated through the great 
hall in these words, — "I hope none of you 
will accuse me of abusing the English," every 
reputed sin of the speaker was forgotten, and 
the audience, unconsciously, yet perfectly, 
seemed to pass within the sphere of her con- 
trol. Not an element of popularity was want- 



126 ' OUTLINES, 

iug in this lecture. Wit, satire, sarcasm double 
edged, yet sheathed in smiles ; history, politics, 
religion ; quotations from Scripture ; anecdotes 
of society, all followed each other in brilliant 
succession. 

She mixed with her careless gossip a strange 
quantity of sagacious thought, and of earnest, 
humane reflection. Rarely a man, and -very 
rarely a woman, holds so complete a control 
over the modulations of voice as did Lola. Ever 
changing, its intonations were perfect and sweet 
as they were infinite. In her physique ; in the 
perfect abandon of her manner ; in her voice, 
were hidden the secrets of her power. The 
rest was centered in her head, rather than in 
her heart. She had a most subtle perception 
of character, a crystal intellect, and any quan- 
tity of sang froid. The delicate skill with 
which she played upon that harp of many 
strings, a popular audience, proved her to be 
the natural diplomat. She carried the audience 
with her completely ; and when at last the vel- 
vet robe, the laces, the bouquet of flowers, and 
the rarely radiant face made their courtesy ing 
exit, it was amid the most enthusiastic and 
deafening applause. 

Poor Lola Montez is dead. The newspapers 



LOLA MONTEZ. ' 127 

gathered up tlie records of her death-struggle, 
and the strange incidents of her most eventful 
life, and made personal columns of the rarest 
interest. They can tell no more new tales of 
Lola. There will be no more erratic actions, 
no more eccentric freaks, no more wild exploits 
or doubtful liaisons to record of her. The beau- 
tiful intrigante^ the clever diplomatist, the err- 
ing, willful, wayward woman, the generous 
and loving woman is dead. Her wondrous 
wit and beauty and brightness have gone out 
under the winter snow ; and the last story is 
told, — " She died." If it must be any, may it 
be men who shall now prove accusing disciples 
with stones all ready to fling at her memory. 
Let women be kind, and grant at least the 
meed of a tear or a sigh for her, because she 
was a woman. In reading the lives of the 
world's famous women, — women who reigned 
in society, in literature, in politics, women 
whom men flattered, followed, worshipped, and 
obeyed, — nothing in all the splendor of their 
lives is so impressive as the story of its close. 
Of all the gorgeous women of the past, no mat- 
ter how great their dower of genius, of beauty, 
or of power ; the great Elizabeth, the courtly 
Maintenon, the glorious De Stael, all that can 
be said at last, is, " She died." And in dying, 



128 OUTLINES. 

how did tlie fashion of this world fade from the 
once entranced vision ; how did its paltry gauds 
slip from the loosed hands, and, at last, nothing 
could suffice within those wasted fingers, saye 
the Bible and the cross. This story of life was 
repeated once more in all its wonderful signifi- 
cance when the minister of Christ found the 
most beautiful and gifted courtesan of the nine- 
teenth century weeping oyer the story of the 
Magdalen. Lola Montez, who once ruled a 
kingdom and its king ; whose palace-home was 
beautiful with all that wealth and art and loye 
could layish ; who knew all the triumphs, the 
yicissitudes, the sorrow, which wonderful beauty 
and misdirected gifts can bring, had httle more 
than enough to buy the narrow house which 
sjielters her now in Greenwood, and that little 
more she bequeathed to the society which sayes 
in its tender charity the outcast women of this 
city. " Baroness of Rosenthal," " Countess of 
Landsfelt," titles which she had once been 
proud to bear, she was equally willing to lay 
aside at the door of the graye ; and '' Eliza Gil- 
bert," her maiden name, was the one which she 
chose to be recorded on her simple coffin. Lola 
Montez died poor, but not friendless ; she was 
surrounded by many who loyed her for the in- 
herent sweetness of her nature ; and it is much 



LOLA MONTEZ. 129 

to say of any one, which was truly said of her, 
that those who knew her best loved her most 
entirely. If she was erratic, high-tempered, 
and irritable, she was also generous, forgiving, 
and affectionate. The result of the former in- 
firmities have been published largely to the 
world ; but the acts, born of the latter, her 
munificent charities, her deeds of ruth and 
mercy to the poor and sorrowing, she never 
blazoned ; yet we may believe that they found 
a higher and purer record. In the main, the 
public journals dealt gen.erously and justly with 
her memory. If they did not att-empt to jus- 
tify her faulty life, neither did they altogether 
forget the misfortunes which controlled that 
life, and which were sufficient to hide a multi- 
tude of sins more heinous than hers. The New 
York " Times," in its kind and truthful obitu- 
ary, said " The sensation of helplessness which 
she had experienced, and the indignities to which 
it had subjected her, were the causes which first 
directed her attention to the subject of some 
profession in which she might attain an inde- 
pendence. The stage is the aspiration of all 
lorn womanhood, and towards the stage she 
turned her best endeavors." It is a very easy 
thing to denounce the life and character of 
another. No high qualities are demanded to 



130 OUTLINES. 

judge as the world judges. But it takes a 
larger insight, a wider, saintlier charity to pene- 
trate far back to the inevitable circumstances 
which gave color and shape to that character 
and life. All possibilities of goodness, as well 
as of evil, lie m the soundless depths of such a 
nature as Lola Montez. The atmosphere in 
which it is forced to grow decides which shall 
be warmed and sunned into blossoming, and 
which siiall lie dormant forever. Think of 
this, mother, when you look into the burning 
eyes of the girl-child beside your hearth, whose 
fathomless soul you have never sounded, whose 
mysterious future you cannot foretell ! Bless 
God, if you have grace to guard and guide her ; 
left to herself and the world, what might she 
become ? 



XTII. 

THINGS GONE BY. 

The cottage on Fourth Street is closed, and 
its gate is fastened. I lean against its fence, 
and try to make its trees and flowers seem as 
they did one year ago. There is not a shrub 
nor flower here that was not planted by a sin- 
gle pair of hands ; not a plant but was loved by 
one human heart. I try to bring that woman 
back and make her real again. In no other 
human being had I ever seen quite such in- 
tensity, such tenacity of life, such wide-reach- 
ing, irrepressible sympathies, such boundless 
benevolence. How many wounds she bound 
up, how many dying soldiers she nursed and 
cherished, how many toilsome journeys she 
took, how many sleepless nights she passed 
for their sakes. Yet how many of all who re- 
ceived life anew from her hands remember her 
to-night ! Almira Fales was preeminently a 
heroine of the war. Yet already her name 
has gone by with her human life. It cannot 
be put into words what that human life was to 



132 , OUTLINES, 

her. How she loved to Hve ! How absohite to 
her was every paljoable form of beauty. How 
inseparable from her consciousness everything 
that she saw and felt and loved. How close 
she lived to Nature. " How she clung to this 
green earth. Yet her door is shut, her gate 
is closed. The trees and flowers which she 
planted bloom on without her. That life so 
intense, so real, so near, now by my utmost 
effort I cannot touch it, nor feel it, nor reahze 
it, although it still exists. That woman so 
human, so living, so loving, that it seemed as 
if she must live in our humanity forever, is as 
remote to me this moment as the most distant 
saint in the centuries, and intangible as the 
furthest seraph in the heavens. What else can 
so change our existence into the impalpable 
substance of a dream as to have such a -life 
with us, of us, full of human love and hope 
and suffering, and then to exhale into the un- 
substantial memory of a life gone by. The re- 
flection of such a life might fall on one in any 
place. Yet here it reminds me that in no other 
city in the land do we walk so perpetually in 
the shadow of persons and of events gone by 
as in the city of Washington. 

I sit down in the Red Room, and, looking 
back to the time when Mrs. Adams dried the 



THINGS GONE BY. 133 

executive linen and cotton above its bare floors, 
what processions have trooped within its crim- 
son hangings. Memory leaves no room to evoke 
the courtly Mrs. Madison, the stately Mrs. 
Polk, the statuesque Miss Lane, the statesmen 
and beauties of generations and of administra- 
tions before the war. To remember the people 
who gathered here between Lincoln's first and 
last reception is to recall more ghosts of things 
gone by than one memory can conveniently 
entertain. Lincoln's last reception ! Who that 
was there will ever forget it, when statesmen, 
generals, soldiers, common men, tearful women, 
and little children passed beneath the blazeless 
chandeliers, which had burned above so many 
smiling crowds, to look for the last time on the 
murdered Chief, whose melancholy eyes for the 
first time refused their gentle, human smile. 

But in Washington it is rarely the dead who 
remind its of things gone by — it is the living. 
The belle of a past administration comes back 
expecting, without a doubt, to renew old con- 
quests and to achieve new triumphs. The little 
girls whom she left in short frocks she finds in 
the places which she filled. She wonders what 
ails the faces of her friends — she left them 
smooth and young, she finds them lined and 
old — and it does not occur to her that they 



134 OUTLINES, 

are making the same comments on her own. 
The man whom she refused in her imperious 
youth, because he was poor and positionless, 
she finds rich and powerful, with a fair wife by 
his side, whom she cordially hates. The old 
door-keepers at the Capitol, who used to swing 
back the doors of the Diplomatic Gallery so 

obsequiously at the very sight of Hon. 's 

daughter, are now among things gone by. The 
new ones, in the plain, middle-aged woman, 
recognize no former belle. They challenge 
her — ask her if she belongs to " a member's 
family." The " open sesame " has gone from 
her hands. She has no choice but to go to a 
side gallery, or to go home — which, at present, 
means the hotel. She still assumes " full dress," 
lifts a bare and bony neck above a girlish corsage 
of tulle, hangs the roses of June in her faded hair. 
But in vain. She is a queen without a throne. 
Her kingdom and her subjects are among the 
things gone by. To the careless young genera- 
tion about her she is '' only an old maid, who 
was a belle once, mamma says." She leaves 
the Capitol in disappointment and disgust ; and 
she was a wise woman who said that she would 
"never come back again." The woman of 
letters, who achieved an ephemeral fame a 
generation past, returns to early hamits with 



THINGS GONE BY, 135 

the old ambition for adulation and power burn- 
ing unabated in heart and brain. The public 
men who courted and flattered her, the society- 
dames who followed her for the favors of her 
pen, are now among the things gone by. In- 
stead of being alone in her special sphere, 
attracting public attention and admiration to 
herself as a solitary and exceptional genius, she 
finds dozens of women who think, write, and 
help shape public opinion, each claiming her 
special work, her special audience, meeting the 
demands of a later era of a younger generation. 
She is no longer the lone particular star, at 
which everybody turns to gaze both in public 
and private assemblies. She walks lonely and 
unheeded where she once moved the central 
object of universal admiration. If she falls to 
lamenting the giants forever departed ; if she 
sees nothing but pigmies in their places ; if she 
declares that there are no longer any great men, 
nor any beautiful women ; that the new writers 
are all '' weak," and writing '' in horrible taste," 
it is very natural, but no less unfortunate ; for 
every word she utters only assures us that she 
has had her day, and belongs already to things 
gone by. If a man who has held a high office 
of public power comes back to his lost kingdom 
(though, if he is a wise man, he never will), he 



136 OUTLINES. 

finds the multitude, that once bowed down to 
him, all worshipping the newly-arisen sun. Is 
it possible ? One year ago he ruled the land ! 
Perhaps millions of money and millions of lives 
hung upon his word. All oflBce-hunters, all 
favor-seekers, waited his call with obsequious 
fear. All fashiondom rolled in its carriage to 
his mansion in the West End. It is empty 
enough now. He is solitary enough at present ; 
he has time to eat, and a good deal to spare. 
No impatient crowd now waiting all day for the 
privilege to say " Just a word." No cringing 
sycophant, lifting his hat in air to " ]Mr. Secre- 
tary," meets him at every turn. They have 
no use for him any longer. He has nothing 
more for them ; and they show that they know 
it by leaving him beliind and chasing his suc- 
cessor. He already belongs to the things gone 
by. The successful pohtician, whose ambition 
may have leaped to the highest gifts in the 
keeping of the people, learns suddenly some 
day that the great tidal wave of fortune, which 
has borne him so high without reaching the 
highest mark, is already setting backward. It 
has seemed so long such an easy thing to hold 
the balance of popularity, to be a manager, a 
leader, that no political triumph has seemed 
impossible, no prize beyond his reach. It drops 



THIXGS GONE BY. 137 

like a thunderbolt some day, the knowledge 
that a new leader has arisen, that new com- 
binations have been formed ; envy, jealousy, 
rivalry, political hatred, — all are at work to 
defeat the man who hitherto has outstripped 
all competitors. He is no longer sure of his 
friends. Men smile in his face, and stab his 
reputation in the dark. They assert that he 
has attained the utmost reward due his powers 
or his service, and shall receive no more. Nor 
will he. He has reached his utmost mark. The 
wave of political favor, rolling backward, rises 
no more. Thus political aspirants, at the very 
floodtide of ambition, find that success has al- 
ready rolled back among the things gone by. 

A wife, in some moment of loneliness, comes 
unawares to the consciousness that the love 
which she dreamed of in her impassioned girl- 
hood is already a thing gone by. She learns 
this as she slowly accepts the fact that will not 
be denied that the husband in whom her being 
begins and ends can live without her. She learns 
this as she waits the long hours through for one 
who does not come. As she waits for him, she 
recalls the hours long gone, when, with all the 
ardor of a young man's first love, he swore to 
her that she was all the world to him ! She 
believed him — tender, credulous woman ! And 



138 OUTLINES. 

he, in his first glamour, believed himself. How 
bitter is her awakening ! How changed is all 
the earth when she at last admits the fact that 
his life has many objects ; that it is but a por- 
tion of his nature which she holds ; that, if she 
should drop from it forever, it would flourish on 
no less — that he could live without her. He 
loves her still. When he finds it convenient to 
come, if he did not find her waiting for him in 
the accustomed place, he would look at the 
vacant little chair with a sense of injury. Per- 
haps he gives her all the time left from crowd- 
ing ambitions and hurrying cares. Why should 
she ask for more ? Is she not his wife ? Ac- 
cording to her nature, she submits to time's ir- 
remediable law. Perhaps with reproaches and 
tears, unfortunate woman ; perhaps in uncom- 
plaining silence. In either case, she mourns for 
something gone never to return — the freshness 
of love's first consciousness, the rapture of its 
dawning delight. It is love still ; but it is love 
touched by the inevitable chill and change of 
experience and of time. 

The mother clings to her child, and feels that 
she holds something in her arms that will need 
her forever ; but the little girl grows away from 
her love and cherishing to the nearer love and 
care of another, and the little boy leaves her 



THINGS GONE BY. 139 

behind. The man out in the great world may 
live a life which his mother cannot fathom and 
never share. He may treat her with reverent 
care or condescending affection ; he may snub 
and forget her ; but to the mother her child is 
forever her child. She lives in the joy of his 
babyhood, long gone by ; and thus it happens 
that a noseless doll and a battered little boot, 
that the baby played with or wore, cherished in 
some secret drawer, is dearer to the woman's 
heart than all the possessions which the man 
has won in the world. Some of the loneliest 
people whom I have ever known have borne 
and nurtured children, only to be left in their 
old age alone. They found all their joy in hving 
over the years gone by ; and every date resolved 

itself into the time '' when was a baby." 

No fact of human existence impresses me so 
profoundly as the individual loneliness of human 
life. Amid the happiest relationships, amid the 
most congenial of companionships, it is no less 
significant. The dearest cannot follow us into 
the depths of loss and of sorrow into which we 
must sometimes go down. And this through 
no lack of love, through no weakness of sym- 
pathy, but from human inability. They cling 
to us, they call to us, yet we die alone. And 
many more than we dream of, and they often 



140 OUTLINES. 

» 

the tenderest and sweetest of souls, in the ulti- 
mate sense, live alone. How often the dearest 
experiences of our human lot are partial, tran- 
sitory, and unsufficing. Every joy bears one 
consummate flower which is never repeated. 
Happiness, like beauty, grows to its supreme 
moment ; tlien, however imperceptibly, wanes. 
It is beauty, it is happiness still ; but some 
change has touched it since its perfect hour. 
The flower out with nature has its growth, its 
perfection, its decline. No less does the human 
flower, in body, in brain, in spirit, follow its 
seasons. How beautiful, how brief they are. 
With the keenest consciousness of the present 
comes the keener consciousness of its passage. 
Stay, beautiful youth ! Stay, thou entrancing 
noon ! Stay, innocent love, supreme delight ! 
Stay, calm thought, thou angel of peace ! While 
we utter the cry, while we stretch out eager 
hands to detain, the boon is already among the 
things gone by. No entreaty can bring it back. 
Rachel weeping for her children did not fill the 
world with a deeper lamentation than the often 
unuttered cry of the human heart calling for 
the joy that was, but is not. Thus life is a per- 
petual mausoleum. Every day the heart buries 
its dead. Every day some cherished plan, some 
silent hope, some dear desire, goes down to its 



THINGS GONE BY. 141 

grave. We leave it behind. We go on, making 
no outward sign of the inward loss. But soine- 
where, sometime we sit down by the way, and 
silently count over our losses. Then we ac- 
knowledge that the treasure most deeply missed 
and mourned is one of which the world has no 
knowledge, and of which our words have made 
no record. The past is always picturesque. 
Time softens all asperities. It mellows all 
crudeness. The passing discord, the painful 
peculiarity, the personal repulsion which often 
jars and hurts us in the intercourse of the 
present lies dim and almost lost in the perspec- 
tive of the past. Through its hallowing radi- 
ance the beloved individual comes back to us 
glorified from all defect. Life's supreme mo- 
ments of blended bliss and pain lose their pangs 
in time ; and in memory we live them over and 
over again in ever new delight. Thus it is that 
our dead are ever angelic. Thus it is that the 
joy gone by is forever ideal and divine. 

I have not been stringing pathetic sentiments 
together for the sake of being pathetic ; but 
have illustrated imperfectly the inexorable law 
of human mutation, which we must all obey. 
And this is the question evolved. How shall we 
meet and bear its penalties ? With vmrest ? 
with repining ? with futile rebellion ? or with 



142 OUTLINES. 

serene philosophy and cheerful religion ? You 
are beautiful to-day ; many worship you. You 
will wake some morning to find your beauty 
gone, your worshippers kneeling at other shrines. 
You have power to-day — so much it seems to 
you that the world, your world at least, could 
not get on without you. Some day you will 
come suddenly to the knowledge that your 
power has gone, your burdens have dropped 
upon other shoulders, your honors are worn by 
•other men ; and the world, even your world, 
gets on without you. 

Life offers no lesson to mortals so hard to 
learn, no lesson hiding in its truth so keen a 
sting to self-love as this, that your prime has 
passed, and that you must make room for 
others ; that the flower of your beauty, the 
flower of your genius are in their decline ; that 
you must wait in the shadow, while the younger 
bask in the splendor that you have left behind. 
How few are ever willing to admit that their 
time has come to learn it. Thus it is that we 
see so many women refusing to grow old grace- 
fully. Instead of wearing their years as a 
crown, mellow and beautiful in the light of 
their declining sun, they deck gray hairs and 
wrinkles with a hideous counterfeit of youth. 
This is why we see writers writing on reputa- 



THINGS GONE BY. 143 

tions which they have long outlived ; writing 
after they have ceased to have anything to say, 
except to repeat what they said better years 
and years ago. This is why we see men once 
in power still imagining themselves important, 
and in garrulous and impotent speech evoking 
the ghosts of a dead reputation in the councils 
of younger men. 

And yet repose is not death. Rest has its 
recompense as well as labor. Through every 
mutation of our life we are followed by the 
divine compensations. The noon has not passed, 
but it soon will. In the afternoon let me renew 
my life in the morning lives of younger souls 
around me. Let me not begrudge them the 
youth once so bounteously bestowed upon me. 
They will rob no one, they will but be glad in 
their own- share of the inheritance of being. 
Then let me thank God that he gave me my 
day — its niorning, its noon, its peaceful twi- 
light shadow. Let me be glad that I had my 
day, and thus with rejoicing take my place 
among the things gone by. 



XIV. 

THE FALLEN MAN. 

We see pictures of the fallen woman at every 
turn. In the pulpit, on the platform, we hear 
her portrayed with an accuracy and an unctioxi 
which makes our pulses stand still with pain 
and horror. Why does nobody paint the fallen 
man ? Why does no priestly voice call upon us 
to weep over his downfall and his shame ? I 
see him everywhere. He came into a shop in 
Broadway, yesterday. His clothes were torn, 
his feet were bare, his eyes were glaring with 
the insanity of drunkenness. A wild animal 
could scarcely have been more dangerous. 
What a creature to go home to wife and chil- 
dren ! He was only a fallen man of the most 
degraded type. There is a fallen man who 
never staggers in ragged clothes with bare feet. 
He stands at the corners of streets ; he lounges 
in the doors of hotels ; he emerges from drinking 
and gambling saloons ; he comes out of the 
house whose door leads to death. His fall is 
graven on his face — in its haggard lii^es, in his 



THE FALLEN MAN. 145 

sunken eyes, in his weary yet mocking look, from 
which purity and peace and the possibility of in- 
nocent happiness have gone. There is a fallen 
man whose garb is faultless, whose face fails to 
tell his story. He is never seen on forbidden 
ground, never in questionable places. The 
latch-string of gracious homes always hangs out 
for him. Mothers are eager to commit to his 
care their innocent daughters. Women beauti- 
ful and idle seek him, and flatter him on to a 
deeper fall. His fall is graven onlj^ on his soul ; 
yet he is no less a fallen man. No less fallen, 
because only he and his God knows that the 
wreck of a life, the everlasting sorrow of a 
lovely soul lie at his door. In the gay world 
few reproofs are uttered, no tears are shed, for 
^the fallen man. While he wears fine clothes, 
while he cames a full purse, society ignores 
even the possibility of his fall. His victim is 
shut out in shame ; but the woman who makes 
a victim of Mm is a wearer of the purple of this- 
world, a bearer of the pomp and triumph of life^ 
Through so many ages man has been the ac- 
knowledged seducer of woman, the fact has 
been overlooked and forgiven that woman is 
often the seducer of man. I know such a wo- 
man — a woman of fashion, allied to a man high 
in position. She is a woman of large personal 

10 



146 OUTLINES. 

and mental magnetism. For what good pur- 
pose does she use it ? She uses it to " attract " 
men from their allegiance to duty, honor, and a 
pure love ! She boasted in a drawing-room 
that " she never saw a married man whose love 
she could not win away from his wife, if she 
chose,'^'^ " My dear husband," said a fond lit- 
tle woman, " you could not ; nobody could take 
him from me." " The little simpleton ! " de- 
clared the Lamia, afterward. " In less than six 
months she came to me crying, begging me to 
give her husband back to her ; that he neglected 
her, that he upbraided her constantly because 
she was not more like me. I don't want your 
husband, I said ; I only wanted to show you that 
I could do what I pleased, and to teach you not 
to trust in any man's love." There is many a 
Lamia. She stands the central figure of many 
a social circle. In silken attire, in a luxurious 
home, surrounded by all the. alluring accessories 
of wealth and cultivation, herself fascinating, 
if not beautiful, what wonder that she draws 
within her charmed sphere the many homeless, 
wifeless, dissatisfied men of her acquaintance ! 
The power of a woman thus poised and sur- 
rounded cannot be estimated. How does she 
use it ? To inspire the man who basks in its 
splendor to say, '' Such a home will I create for 



THE FALLEN MAN, 147 

the woman I love, such a paradise for my chil- 
dren " ? To encourage, to help him in the pur- 
suit of the usefulness, the influence within the 
reach of his honorable endeavor ? To make him 
in love with the strong, brave, pure manhood 
possible to him? No. She uses it solely to 
make him " fall in love " with herself. All the 
magnetism of her beauty, all the subtlety of her 
brain, is used to satisfy the greed of her vanity, 
the depravity of her passion for personal con- 
quest. Does she know the issues in her life at 
stake ? No matter. His wife, his children, the 
woman who would die for him ? No matter. 
His honor, his integrity, his self-respect ? No 
matter. All together are not an atom in the 
balance, weighed against her insatiate vanity. 
He, all that he cherishes, may go to rack ; but 
she must not be denied her triumph. Some 
hour, when she takes off her gauds, she must be 
able to say, " I conquered him." She must be 
able to wliisper in secret to the weak creature 
who is her '' bosom friend," " I conquered him. 
He went down before me. I was astonished ! 
I couldn't help it, dear ! How can I help it, if 
so many men will fall in love with me ? " Does 
the Lamia ever incur any danger ? No. The 
Lamia can always take care of herself. She 
plies her victim with beguiling flatteries ; she 



148 , OUTLINES. 

bewilders him, between childisli smiles and ten- 
der tears — never shedding enough of the latter 
to make her nose red ; she astonishes him with 
her subtle wisdom ; she is artlessness, she is 
innocence, she is angelhood personified ; she is 
Psyche and Circe combined. Then, after hay- 
ing roused every slumbering impulse and pas- 
sion of the man, if, in an unguarded moment, he 
betrays his weakness, then she is majesty as- 
tounded and virtue on a pedestal ! Then, when 
no longer his own master, her bright doors open 
and shut on him. He goes forth into the night, 
out into the darkness. To what ? To whom ? 

Who will say that woman is in no way re- 
sponsible for the fallen man ? The woman who 
walks the streets in open shame we may follow 
with pitying lamentation. The woman who, 
through the weakness of her will, through the 
magnanimity of her affection, which can never 
be measured or fathomed, stakes all her fate in 
one frail human heart, gives more than her life 
to one erring man, is one over whom the angels 
in heaven must weep in compassion. 

But she who, wearing the garments of afflu- 
ence and of influence, still uses the gifts and 
graces of her womanhood only as decoys to lead 
men astray; who, in the guise of innocence, 
would steal their birthright of honor, blur 



THE FALLEN MAN. 149 

their perception of purity, demoralize their af- 
fections, madden their passions ; and then, hav- 
ing proved her power over them for all evil, 
sends them forth into the world to betray and 
to rob the weak and unfortunate — she is the 
woman who is a disgrace to human nature. 
God may pardon her ; but the woman who re- 
spects herself, who loves woman, who honors 
man, never can. Is it strange that the aver- 
age estimate of women by men of the world is 
so low ? that, herding together, they speak of 
women in language which even they would 
blush .that their mothers should hear ; that 
each man, shutting from his memory the pure 
angel of his earliest youth, sneers at virtue as a 
fiction, at the purity of woman as a fable and a 
dream ? 

No one but his mother, his sister, or his wife 
weeps for the fallen man. 

This is one of the saddest mistakes of our 
world ; one for which all humanity suffers — 
viz., that purity, demanded imperatively of 
woman, is deemed impossible to man. Where 
is the safeguard to society ? Where its exalted 
standard ? While men are left to believe, and 
to act accordingly, that virtue, in the sense in 
which it is expected of women, is not within 
their power. The practical working of this 



150 OUTLINES. 

theory makes each sex but the prey to the 
other. This will always be, till the standard of 
virtue in woman is made also the standard of 
virtue in man. It was a great and pure man 
who uttered these words : '' The world will 
never be better till men subject themselves to 
the same laws which they impose upon women.'* 
It was a man said this. Were it a woman, all 
the apostles of hcense would at once declare 
that she said it, because, being a woman, she 
could not know what man is. I do not forget 
what human nature is, in its universal and 
unchanging essence. I do not forget in its 
best estate how frail it is, how easily over- 
come ; nor forget the inevitable modifications 
of life and character resulting from the vary- 
ing laws of temperament, of sex, of physical 
and mental organization. But neither the his- 
tory of polygamy or of monogamy, Campbell's 
" Philosophy of Marriage," or Leckey's " His- 
tory of European Morals," or the history of the 
whole life of man in every race, and through 
every age from the beginning of the world till 
now, can make me believe that man created in 
the image of God, man immortal as his Sire, 
man the head of all human intelligence, through 
all his earthly life, is at best but little more 
than a bundle of blind instincts and of lawless 



THE FALLEN MAN. 151 

appetites, at whose mercy he is, which he is as 
powerless to control as the beast at his feet. 
This brutal idea is the underlying impulse of 
polygamy, of all the lasciviousness, license, and 
barbarism on the earth. The sister is taught, 
whatever her temptation may be, that she must 
be good ; the brother is left to believe that, 
however he tries, he cannot help being bad. It 
is expected of him that he will grow to be a re- 
spectable man some day ; but before that event, 
through the law of his nature, he must neces- 
sarily be very wicked. The sister is taught 
that she must preserve herself blameless for the 
future husband to whose life she is to be the 
crown ; the brother is left to spend the same 
time " sowing his wild oats." To his wife he 
is to bring no virginity of heart, no purity of 
person, no record of a stainless past ! Many a 
man looks into the eyes of the wife, who trusts 
him as she does her God ; into the faces of his 
daughters, who believe him to be scarcely 
lower than the angels, with a secret remorse 
which cannot be measured, as memory forces 
in upon his thought what he has been, perhaps 
what he is. With what shame he is conscious 
that, if they knew his secret history, he would 
stand transformed before their eyes ; that, to 
remain what he is in their thoughts, he must 



152 OUTLINES, 

hide forever from their knowledge the crimes 
of his youth. Young man, remember this ! 
The dearest reward that can come to you in 
this world, is a real home — the loye and faith 
and help of wife and children. Remember 
this, while striving with foes without and foes 
within. If you will^ you can live worthy of 
your heritage. You can cherish a faith in hu- 
man goodness ; you can cultivate personal 
friendship with noble men and women ; you 
can fill your life with honorable occupation and 
cheerful recreation ; you can " steep your soul 
in one pure love ; " and, trusting in God, you 
will never be a fallen man. The grandest ob- 
ject this side the throne of God is a perfect 
man — a man powerful in brain, powerful in 
frame, with conscience and will ruhng over the 
animal force which makes the puissant basis of 
his manhood. The saddest sight on earth, is 
such a man in ruin. By the height of what he 
might have been do we measure and deplore 
the fall which makes him what he is. Passion 
may be grand ; but it is passion in obedience. 
Appetite is not ignoble till it debases the soul 
and triumphs over purity. With our finest 
theories we cannot make this crooked world 
straight. But each one may make it so much 
the better and brighter by at least the charac- 



THE FALLEN MAN. 153 

ter of one individual. When shall we have 
purity in our Uves ? When peace in our 
hearts ? When joy in our homes ? It will 
be when woman feels a deeper responsibility 
for her personal power over every man who 
comes within her influence ; when that power 
is tested and controlled by a health}^ conscience 
and a pure heart ; it will be when she ceases to 
regard every man that she meets as the legiti- 
mate prey to her vanity, as a tyrant to be turned 
into a slave, as a Sampson to be shorn of his 
strength. It will be when, with true recogni- 
tion and reverence, she meets the roj^alty of 
manhood with the royalty of womanhood, say- 
ing : "If thou art the world's king, I am the 
world's queen ! " It will be when man tests 
all his relations with woman by the same 
code of impartial honor which makes him hon- 
orable among men. It will be when he who 
scorns to be false to his comrade, will scorn 
equally to be false to a woman ; when he shall 
cease to stoop to subterfuge, to deceit, to false- 
hood, to keep peace with numbers of women, 
to each of whom he is personally commit- 
ted, over all of whom he desires to exercise 
a secret, illegitimate power. It will be when 
each man seeks in each woman something of 
that divine quahty of womanhood which even 



154 OUTLINES. 

the basest man desires to find in his mother, in 
his sister, in his wife. It will be when each 
shall cease to say : " I will absorb, rule over, 
possess this creature of God." It will be when 
both shall seek in the other their noblest friend, 
their truest and dearest companion ; when the 
woman shall revere the man as man because he 
is worthy of such honor, and the man revere 
the woman as woman because she commands 
his reverence before she wins his love. Then 
we shall not have the cause that we now have 
to weep over the fallen woman and to bow our 
heads in shame before the fallen man. 



XV. 

PHYSICAL BASIS OF STATESMANSHIP. 

A PORTRAIT of Mr. Gladstone in a num- 
ber of " Every Saturday " is very suggestive of 
Mr. Fessenden. Indeed, it seems almost as if 
it were Senator Fessenden, rounded out into 
ampler life. It is what he would have been if 
his body had equaled his brain. Of the two, 
the English premier's head is less powerful in 
development than that of the American senator. 
There is less height, less width, less causative 
fullness in the frontal dome. But any slight 
discrepancy here is more than atoned for by the 
capacious nostrils that give air to the brain- 
cells, the great throat, the broad shoulders, the 
grand enginery below which propels this brain 
and sustains it. What might not Mr. Fessenden 
have been with such physical adjuncts ? With 
them he would have been still on the earth, and 
in the Senate. He would have been building 
up a grand record for history, recording for pos- 



156 OUTLINES, 

terity works more immortal than the " Juyentns 
Mundi." Here the pious thing to say would 
be that he is '' better off " — so much better off 
among the seraphim than in the Senate. I'm 
not going to say it. I prefer an honest hobby 
to dishonest cant ; and it is very dishonest cant 
to be constantly attributing to the " Lord's 
will " that for which we ourselves are to blame. 
"V\Tien the minister said it, '' It is the Lord's 
will, and marvelous in our eyes," I used to cry. 
Now the same words in the most pathetic 
quaver only move me to send him " Hall's 
Journal of Health," or some other journal on 
hygiene and dietetics equally sensible. It need 
no longer be '' marvelous in our eyes " why so 
many are cut off in the midst of their days. 
Hygienic law cannot banish death ; but it can 
prolong existence. This law of the Lord of life 
and health defied and broken every day costs 
the nation many of its most illustrious children. 
We have more occasion to be concerned for the 
bodies of our public men than for their brains. 
If they took a little more intelligent care of the 
former, there would be less trouble with the 
latter ; and how many splendid lives would be 
spared to the public service and to the hearts 
that love them. It is the manner of all who 
visited the Congi'esses of the last generation to 



PHYSICAL BASIS OF STATESMANSHIP. 157 

come back to the new-winged Capitol, and in 
its garnished chambers lament the Corinthian 
and Doric halls of the old House and Senate, 
and more the eloquence vanished and immortal, 
of their most illustrious legislators. " If you 
could only have seen Calhoun and Clay and 
Webster ! If you could have heard them ! " 
Well, I never heard them, and never saw them. 
But I have giants of my own, whom I deplore 
no less devoutly. Seven seasons in Washington 
are suflBcient to make one a veteran, without 
having seen the gods of the earlier decades. I 
have attained the dignity of reminiscence. 

In my little nook in the gallery I murmur of 
changes ; inquire as sadly as Elia for " the old 
familiar faces ; " and to the neophyte beside me 
whisper of greatness gone, of giants departed, 
with all the lamenting unction of a mourner 
of the last generation. If, in addition, memory 
compelled me to jnourn Webster, Clay, and 
Calhoun, my grief would be too much, and I 
should be obliged to stay at home. As it is my 
dear " I," I will confess to you that to my vision 
the Senate looks quite askew. I have tried to 
adjust old seats and new senators with satisfac- 
tion, and have failed. My private opinion 
(which, as usual, I am making public) is, that a 
number of these gentlemen might quite as well 



158 OUTLINES. 

have stayed in their native wilds, or be still 
pursuing destiny, " carpet-bag " in hand. It is 
very evident that they do not belong here. It 
is not in their poor power to reflect any lustre 
upon one of the greatest legislative bodies of 
the world. This being true, why are they here ? 
Shall politics, trickery, and money buy seats for 
third-rate men in this august assembly ? They 
do. Mr. Muddlebrains takes his seat. He who 
by the birthright of God would adorn it, serve 
and honor his country in it, stays at home — at 
least, that is where he very often stays. In 
personal aspect the Senate has retrograded 
within four years. Among all its -elders, one 
looks in vain for two such '' grave and reverend 
seigniors," two such grand old men, as Foots 
and Collamer, of Vermont. Senator Cameron 
carries his seventy years straight and stately as 
a winter pine ; but he has not the noble head, 
the open, large expression, the grandeur of 
mien, which made these men the most senatorial 
of senators. And who, looking down on his 
wonted seat, can cease to mourn for Fessenden, 
the great debater, the incorruptible statesman, 
the irascible, sensitive, loving-hearted man ! 
Not in his seat, it seems as if, waiting a mo- 
ment, we should see him meditatively pacing 
up and down behind it; or slowly slipping 



PHYSICAL BASIS OF STATESMANSHIP, 159 

through the door of the cloak-room, his hands 
in his pockets, his slight figure bent, his great 
head — so much too great for the frame which 
could not support it — always drooping forward, 
as if weighed down with thought, his lips com- 
pressed, his expression one of weariness, often 
of pain. The longer we look the more we miss 
his presence, and the more unreconciled we feel 
to his untimely taking off. The longer we 
listen to a dry dribble of talk, the more we long 
to hear pierce the dullness one of his old keen, 
incisive sentences, cutting straight to the mar- 
row of things. Without him his long-time 
generous antagonist, Sumner, finds no foe at 
once so provocative and worthy of his speech. 
Trumbull, more pugnacious and irate, lacks the 
far sight and wide mental comprehension of 
Fessenden. Charles Sumner still sits the grand- 
est figure of the Senate. He sits as he sat years 
and years ago. Life, which leaves its subtle 
tracery on all our faces, has laid its hand heav- 
ily on his, as it always does on the face of a 
man or woman in whom existence is a battle, 
not a dream. The evening gray has fallen 
on his hair, the trace of many an inward and 
outward conflict is graven in the strong feat- 
ures ; but he has still unbroken what he had 
in the beginning, that which is indispensable 



160 OUTLINES. 

to the successful statesman and orator, — " the 
physical basis of oratory." Without his six 
feet of altitude and his thunderous " ayes and 
noes," Charles Sumner could never have been 
Charles Sumner. If he had been compelled 
by feeble lungs and a defective throat to shriek 
his dictum in a shrill treble or in a squeaking 
pipe, he could never as a statesman have been 
at once the king and the conqueror of an idea. 
If he had been as little as Lord Russell, not 
even Sydney Smith's excuse to the disappointed 
farmers of Devonshire,-— " that he was naturally 
bigger, but had been reduced by his labors in 
the cause of reform," — could ever have given 
him that personal impressment which now, by 
filling the eyes and ears, more than fulfills the 
prestige of his name. Without special premed- 
itation, I have strayed back to the thought 
from whence we started, — the physical basis of 
the statesman. For lack of it Fessenden died. 
For lack of it, and it only, he missed the high- 
est intellectual success ; without its ministry 
even his fine brain could not fulfill its loftiest 
function. For lack of it some of the most in- 
tellectual men in the Senate to-day are slowly 
dying. This would be altogether too gloomy 
to talk about if it were too late for remedy. 
But it hes within human power to stay the 



PHYSICAL BASIS OF STATESMANSHIP. 161 

prodigal waste of human life which marks us 
as a people. Think of the havoc which death 
has made among the most intellectual and illus- 
trious of our race within two Uttle years ! Even 
while I write, the land is mourning for one the 
bravest and best beloved of its soldiers, who 
lived through a hundred battles, to fall dead in 
his prime. Looking at the magnificent phy- 
sique of General Thomas, who can believe that 
by the laws of Nature and God he should have 
perished in the perfect flower of his years ? 
Thus too many Americans perish. The Eng- 
lish statesman, with his athletic habits and out- 
of-door life, carries on his physical and intel- 
lectual power unbroken beyond the years of 
threescore and ten. Past that age we often find 
him bearing the heaviest responsibilities and 
fulfilling the most active duties of the public 
service. 

Thus, with scarcely any relaxation of intel- 
lectual vigor. Lord Palmerston served his coun- 
try to his eighty-second year. Lord Lyndhurst 
made two of the most powerful speeches of his 
life at the age of eighty-six, and died at the 
age of ninety-three. He was an English Amer- 
ican. If an American statesman was not dead 
long before that time, the man who wanted his 
place would declare that he ought to be. The 
11 



162 OUTLINES. 

rare American who lives to such an age is 
usiiaUy spoken of as a second child, who has 
long outlived his time. While the average 
American statesman, no matter how superb the 
stock of vitality with which he begins his ca- 
reer, usually manages to consume it so prod- 
igally and irrationally that, with bad air, bad 
hours, and bad habits, exhaustive labors, and 
inadequate relaxation and exercise, inordinate 
ambitions, contests, and excitements, finds him- 
self an aged man in middle life ; a victim to 
incurable disease, or the ready prey to immi- 
nent and hopeless paralysis. This is not a 
very animating picture of American physical 
deterioration, and the most painful feature of 
it is that it is true. One thing I shall never 
be able to understand : that is, how a being 
arrogating to himself such immense superiority 
as man, — one who in normal strength of nerve 
and muscle and will often is so superior, — 
should yet quite as often, through his entire 
human existence, violate and outrage the laws 
of his physical life, and in controlling impulse 
and appetite show little more than the resisting 
power of an idiot or the strength of a child. If 
you are tempted to think this an exaggerated 
statement, just recount the names of distin- 
guished men who actually murdered themselves 



PHYSICAL BASIS OF. STATESMANSHIP. 163 

by over-eating and drinking. How many thou- 
sands more have done this whose names have 
never been written. 

Excepting, perhaps, a dozen really noble- 
looking men, the United States Senate has 
nothing to be proud of in its external aspect. 
The remainder are a mussy and inferior looking 
company. We have a right to be disappointed 
in them. In the House of Representatives we 
expect to see a heterogeneous assembly, typical 
of many climates and conditions. But from the 
Roman to the American Senate the inflexible 
idea of a senator has been that of an eclectic, 
eloquent, wise, and august man. If a man pos- 
sessing no one of these qualities still by some 
circumstance obtains a senator's seat, I know of 
no patent that he holds to high esteem because 
he has filched a name which he does not honor. 



XVI. 

INSTINCTIVE PHILOSOPHERS AND STATESMEN 

The one-eyed philosopher of the " Edict " 
sees acutely on one side ; but he is as blind as 
a bat on the other. His text is '' Mind's the 
standard of the man ; " and he goes on to show 
that he believes in brain and not in body, and 
to prove that the instinctive philosophers be- 
lieve wholly in body and not at all in brain. 
According to his one eye, the '' Instinctives " 
are a set of lunatics, who in this world of abso- 
lute facts are yet content to lift their faces to 
the sky, and swear incoherently by the repre- 
sentative words of Truth, Justice, Mercy, and 
Purity ; men who put words for ideas, instincts 
for intellect, inspiration for reason ; despisers 
of brain, whose chief strength lies in the use 
of capital letters and exclamation points. Hav- 
ing made these assertions, the one-eyed philoso- 
pher of the " Edict " thinks that he has done the 
clever thing, and feels much relieved. Is it not 
a partial and one-sided thought which discusses 
the mind of man independently of bodily con- 



PHILOSOPHERS AND STATESMEN. 165 

ditions ? Is not a man's brain more dependent 
upon his stomach than his stomach is upon his 
brain ? We are no more all intellect than we 
are all instinct. There is no fact more signifi- 
cant than the dual life of the human being. 
The " Edict " may publish another loose dis- 
sertation on this material thought ; but it can- 
not destroy its truth, that " man is man only 
by virtue of his blood." If every thought in- 
volves the death of an atom of the brain, its 
exquisite loss can only be supplied by the vivid 
current from the heart which feeds and vital- 
izes it. If this be diseased and depraved, the 
organ of thought is touched with its disease and 
its depravity, and the very thought evolved is 
more or less tainted and morbid. If '' mind " 
— or, rather, character, the finest emanation of 
the intellect and heart — " makes the standard 
of the man," how puerile to discuss that stand- 
ard while ignoring the contributive conditions 
which fix irrevocably the quality of that mind 
and character. Perhaps it is very clever in the 
" Edict " to cry out : " Is there some one of the 
organs in his square-built, well-put-together 
body which gives him absolute truths by pro- 
cess of secretion? Has he glands that would 
give us a good bill to regulate the civil service 
of the United States ? " But all this cleverness 



166 OUTLINES, 

does not annihilate the fact that more than one 
" absolute truth," and many '' bills " in Con- 
gress have been defeated and destroyed through 
the " processes " of diseased '' secretions " and 
through " glands " which refused to perform 
their functions. It is because we believe in 
the supremacy of reason and of the moral facul- 
ties that we insist that the highest health and 
perfectibility of the human body is necessary 
to their perfect development ; and insist upon 
it as a general axiom no less because we re- 
member several geniuses and a few saints who 
managed to exist in bodies which were daily 
insults to their souls. In this life, at least, the 
spirit of man cannot act independently of the 
material organs through whose medium alone 
it finds human expression. Robust vitahty 
may exist with a coarse brain and an obtuse 
organism ; and a large brain of fine fibre for 
a season may struggle and assert its inher- 
ited power though impeded in its action by 
vitiated blood. In defiance of morbid condi- 
tions, it is able for a time to assert the laws of 
its primal inheritance. I am thinking of two of 
our own statesmen, born giants in intellectual 
strength, who now in middle life are bowed 
down with more than the infirmities of age. A 
powerful intellect in a powerful body was God's 



PHILOSOPHERS AND STATESMEN. 167 

birthright to each. If they have cherished the 
first, tliey have outraged the last. They have 
destroyed the perfect mechanism through which 
only their intellects can act ; they have broken 
Nature's sacred laws till they are objects of 
pity, in their mental and physical pain — till 
there is nothing left for them but suffering, and 
the certain grave a few months further on. The 
spasmodic action of their powerful minds is 
like the fitful flare of a dying flame. In the 
sudden and transient gleam we are painfully 
reminded of what the steadfast light of such 
intellects might have been, sustained by strong 
and steady health. We can illy spare them 
from the legislation of the nation. They should 
have grown old in age and honors in its coun- 
sels. Not the " weighty matter of govern- 
ment," .nor judicial study, nor devotion to 
'' reason," has made this impossible to them ; 
but the transgression of physical law has 
brought physical death as its swift, inevitable 
consequence. Even the reasoning faculty, 
which our one-eyed philosopher does not too 
much exalt, cannot long exist unimpaired in 
the defrauded and degraded body which he 
despises. And, though he were to sneer on 
through every column of the " Edict," it would 
not annul the truth that temperance and cheer- 



168 OUTLINES. 

ful health must form the basis of mental and 
moral greatness. And though he, gratuitously, 
utterly condemns and rejects our definition of a 
great man, his condemnation is npt frightful. If 
we have a great man, he is great from no intel- 
lectual power solely. That he could be wholly 
great without intellectual power, or if he were 
not a master of knowledge, or of thought, no 
one would declare. But all experience asserts 
that the intellectual power must wear the 
crowning more. Beyond the command of 
knowledge, or of thought, a man must be 
master of himself to be wholly great ; if not, 
his imperfect greatness is a mockery and a 
shame. That superlative purity of the moral 
nature may exist with no commensurate intel- 
lectual stamina we are all aware ; a man may 
be great in goodness only, and through lack of 
mental power totally unfit for the administra- 
tion of public affairs. But what the public ser- 
vice needs, what it demands bevond the force 
of language to declare, is the absolute man : a 
man in whom the moral forces are as perfectly 
developed, as keenly conscious, as the quickest of 
his intellectual faculties ; a man who, whether he 
looks up, or down, or straight forward, can de- 
clare that he loves truth and justice, mercy and 
purity, and prove by his own character and in 



PHILOSOPHERS AND STATESMEN. 169 

every public and private act that he does so 
love. The one-eyed philosopher laughs, and 
sets these words in the mouth of a school-boy, 
to prove that they cannot make him great ; but 
he takes nothing from their significance when 
they are meant and when they are lived. Why 
this outcry for despised '' goodness," for incor- 
ruptible men in high places ? Because it is the 
deepest need of the state. If the need were 
for intellect, the demand would be for that; 
the demand is for intellect exalted by con- 
science. The government has never suffered for 
lack of intellect in its administrators ; but it 
has suffered and does suffer for their lack of 
•conscience. We take it for granted that the 
men who are sent to Washington to administer 
affairs have brains ; we wish that we could 
take it for granted that they have integrity 
also. The truth is, there is a kind of '' smart- 
ness " coupled with unscrupulousness which has 
learned the trick of buying place and patron- 
age, and eagerly pays the price for both, which 
just now is uppermost. If the secrets of the 
government in its various departments could be 
published to the people, they would find that 
what they need most in their public servants is 
not mere intellect ; but a finer honor, a stainless 
rectitude. They want men whose votes and 



170 OUTLINES. 

influence can neither be bought nor sold. Is 
it womanish and old-fashioned to demand such 
men ? Not while the government remains mth 
the people. Have we a Utopian ideal of ex- 
cellence for men in public life ? Not at all. 
But this is true : only men of positive moral 
strength are equal to its exigences and its temp- 
tations. Mr. Congressman came to Washing- 
ton an honest man. In his quiet country home 
he had never been tested beyond his strength ; 
had never grown entirely away from a simple 
and natural life. Once here, the evil forces of 
an over-stimulated life begin to play with desire, 
and conscience, and will. Undreamed of am- 
bitions, a lust for gold and for power, take pos- 
session of him. Besides, Mrs. Congressman 
wants a coach as fine as Mrs. Senator's ; her 
establishment must be as expensive, herself and 
her children as lavishly arrayed. That all this 
can be done with the congressional salary is 
impossible. Now comes the test. Here is a 
thousand dollars for a vote, and thousands more 
to secure a man a place high in government 
patronage ; the '' Whisky Ring," the " Treas- 
ury Ring," and untold speculations. If he sells 
himself to these interests through the weakness 
of his will, this man, supposed to be legislating 
for the people, becomes simply a political gam- 



PHILOSOPHERS AND STATESMEN. 171 

bier, like any other gambler, living by bis mts 
and the tricks of fraud and chance. We have 
no romantic notion of asking congressmen to 
emulate gods and angels, or of demanding their 
freedom from human infirmity, or of asking 
them to lift their faces to the sky to swear at 
random their fealty to any lofty principle ; but 
the people whom they represent have the right 
to demand that they should have the moral 
strength to refuse a bribe, and, striving with 
evil forces within and without, yet be strong 
enough to be true to that which is best in 
themselves. 

The ''Edict" portrays the " Instinctive Phil- 
osophers and Statesmen " as " scorners of rea- 
son " and of common sense, expending their 
fervor in '' double-leaded invocations to Eter- 
nal Justice," and in a frantic use of words to 
which they apply neither meaning nor practice. 
That the most profound words in human lan- 
guage are often used idly and for mere effect 
no one will deny. Thus used and abused, they 
yet lose nothing of their distinctive significance. 
They mean no less. If " words are the only 
things that will last forever," it is because they 
represent that in man which is eternal. They 
are the visible signs of his finest emotions, of 
his subtlest thoughts, of his rarest aspirations ; 



172 OUTLINES. 

or they are tlie embodied types of the degrada- 
tion and the slavery of his soul. To he that 
which the highest words in human speech rep- 
resent is the consummation of human character. 
And to know what you mean, and to mean what 
you say, requires more than a one-eyed or an 
instinctive philosophy. 



xvn. 

PIN-MONEY. 

"Lady Sophia is to have £16,000 jointure 
and <£400 pin-money," said Horace Walpole of 
Lady Sophia Fermor, when she became the wife 
of Lord Carteret, — a lady for whom (although 
a younger son) Horace had dared to cherish 
more than a passing fancy. While English law 
has never hesitated to appropriate the whole of 
the wife's fortune for her lord's benefit, Eng- 
lish custom has always taken care to provide 
her bountifully with pin-money. In this respect 
the Englishwoman is more independent and 
happy than her American sister. As a rule, 
the English wife has the absolute control of a 
certain sum appropriated to household expenses 
and her own personal wants to a much greater 
degree than the American woman. In this 
respect, at least, she is freer, happier, and more 
self-respecting. The very responsibility tends 
to cultivate in her sound judgment, forethought, 
foresight, and prudence in expenditure. A 
creature treated as a child in the use of money 



174 OUTLINES. 

will seldom have more tlian tlie judgment of a 
cliild, albeit it be that of a child of larger 
growth. 

The very extravagance of a large class of 
American women springs from this mode of 
treatment. Impulsive as children in their de- 
sires, they exhibit no more than the judgment 
of children in their expenditures ; hence the 
enormous "bills" which confront the husband 
and father, filling him with wrath or despair, 
in which state he is so often portrayed tearing 
Ms hair or taking with violent hands his own 
life. That men suffer much from the thought- 
less extravagance of women is beyond question. 
It is a fruitful source not only of unhappiness, 
but of vice. Young men, deterred ' from mar- 
riage by horrible forebodings of milliner, dress- 
making, and furniture bills, enter into social 
relations which blight their lives and in innu- 
merable instances make a happy family life for 
them impossible. If the girls of wealthy fam- 
ilies were educated to a wise knowledge of the 
uses and possibilities of money, to the responsi- 
bilities which its possession involves, to habits 
of thoughtful expenditure, with a definite in- 
come settled upon them, within whose limit 
they were to bring the gratification of their 
personal wants, what a decrease there would be 



PIN-MONEY. 175 

in the habit of careless, useless shopping ; in ex- 
orbitant bills ; in a blind, reckless extravagance, 
which neither knows nor counts the cost of any- 
thing on which the fancy may happen to light ! 
Our family monetary system in this country is 
all wrong — in ten thousand instances igno- 
rantly, carelessly, not willfully wrong ; no less its 
hard penalty is paid by ten thousand unhappy 
hearts, in society and at home. If its result is 
extravagance and questionable modes of making 
money, — is recklessness and suicide among the 
more wealthy and f asiiionable ; in average Amer- 
ican life its sequence is niggardliness, misunder- 
standing, discontent, estrangement, and unhap- 
piness. Money in some phase is one of the 
most fruitful sources of unhappy family life, espe- 
cially of unhappiness between husband and wife. 
This is true, while American women as wives 
are among the most indulged women on earth. 
This is one trouble ; they are simply indulged^ 
in greater or less degree ; and mere indulgence 
necessarily infers dependence on one side and 
supremacy on the other. It is the fitful emo- 
tional kindness of a master ; not the just shar- 
ing of an equal. This, carried into the minute 
money-need of daily hfe between two persons 
(so often mentally on a par) living in the re- 
lation of husband and wife, is the source of im- 



176 OUTLINES, 

measurable discord and sorrow. In this relation 
impulse may be good when it happens to be 
generous and tender ; but justice is better. 
Just here is one of the most painful illustrations 
of caste in sex, as developed in daily life. I 
know men — good, kind, manly; who would 
risk their Hves to save their wives in danger, 
who love them, after their own fashion — to 
whom it never occurs that their beloved are not 
among the happiest and most blessed of women ; 
who would declare me insane if I were to say 
that they did their wives injustice and made 
them unhappy every hour in tlie day. Yet I 
do say it, and say it because I love the wives 
better than the husbands ; although the latter, 
as men go, are very admirable indeed. 

There is Dove-eyes. She was one of the ten 
thousand girls of whom North America has such 
just occasion to be proud, — sensitive, refined, 
intelligent, well-educated, self-supporting, high- 
spirited, honorable, tender, loving, and lovable. 
Dove-eyes was the daughter of necessity, and 
for years had supported herself and helped 
others by the honorable toil of her hands and 
brain, when she succumbed to her especial fate 
in the shape of Alexis, to her the Grand Duke 
of all men — indeed, a god walking the earth. 
Out of her woman's small pay she had saved a 



PIN-MONEY. 177 

comfortable dot. When, as his wife, she en- 
tered her Grand Duke's palace, which was small 
and on an unfashionable street, she carried into 
it from her own small earnings furniture to fur- 
nish it, a handsome wardrobe, and a small bank- 
account book of her own. But when she mar- 
ried Alexis she gave up all her opportunity of 
independent support. Henceforth she was to 
work, and to work hard ; but she was to work 
only for Alexis. He was her sole employer. 
Did he pay her as justly as strangers had done ? 
We shall see. While painting pictures, after 
the manner of men in love, his favorite one had 
been of the lovely time coming when she would 
no longer have to toil for a living ; when it 
would be his joy not only to provide for every 
want, but to anticipate it before she knew it 
herself ; and when her chief business would be 
to put on her lovehest dress and freshest ribbons, 
and wait for him with a smoking dinner ready, 
which (in the picture) involved neither care nor 
labor to cook. Nor did Alexis shirk the actual 
demand upon himself necessary to the carrying 
out of his desire. He was what in larder par- 
lance is called " a bountiful provider." He 
made handsome presents at intervals to his vrif e, 
and he said : " My dear, if you want money, all 
you have to do is to call on me." It sounded 

12 



178 OUTLINES. 

beautifully. What could be more generous? 
Both were very much in love, and for a time all 
was blessed. Alas ! the most ample trousseau 
will wear out. Pretty wedding frocks will 
grow old-fashioned and take on a look of antiq- 
uity. Babies are little cherubs who need many 
clothes, which they outgrow with a frightfully 
rapid impunity. I am sorry for everybody who 
has not a baby, yet no one will deny that it is 
the most costly of all God's gifts. What suffer- 
ing, what anxiety, what money it costs to convey 
it safely from the jBrst tooth to the last one of 
all dreadful baby diseases I Dove-eyes woke up 
one day, to find that her last prettj^ dress had 
been cut up for baby ; that the last cent of her 
own little bank-stock had been paid out for 
baby — for extra doctor visits, extra diet, extra 
airings, for many nameless little needs, Avhich a 
man would never dream of, but which are no 
less necessary for that. Alexis would think 
them unnecessary. Dove-ej^es believed them to 
be indispensable — life itself to her and baby! 
She woke up to the still more bitter conscious- 
ness that she had not a cent of money that she 
could call her own ; not a cent that she could 
spend as her own necessity or judgment dictated. 
This, hard to any woman, is especially so to a 
woman who had always had her own indepen- 



PIN-MONEY, 179 

dent resources, however small ; who had always 
had her own small private fund, on which to 
draw for her own personal necessities. Hard as 
it was at first, she had tried to overcome her 
reluctance to ask Alexis for money. " It was 
foolish and over sensitive not to be willing to do 
so," she said. It was wrong in her to feel as if 
it made her seem like a poor dependent to come 
and ask her husband for what she needed. Did 
she not at home work as hard and for more hours 
than he in his counting-room ? Indeed, her 
work now was never done. It used to be she 
could sit in the evening and read. Now baby 
cried so she could not even listen to Alexis read 
the evening paper, but had to carry baby off 
out of his father's sight, that his cries might not 
prevent his comprehending the evening news. 
Had not Alexis said that '' all he had was 
hers ? " She had tried to think of this, and to 
ask for a few dollars just as if they were hers, 
which he held in trust for her benefit. Alas ! 
after the first or second trying, it was a miser- 
able failure. She had asked when Alexis hap- 
pened to be cross or short of money, and he 
exclaimed : " Why, what have you done with 
the last ? Gone already ? " She ventured to 
say that it had gone to the doctor ; when Alexis 
responded : " I must say, Dove-eyes, I think 



180, OUTLINES. 

your fears for that child make you send for the 
doctor oftener than is necessary." Dove-eyes 
was not sure that she didn't. She tried to put 
down her own sensitiveness, and still go to 
Alexis for money when necessary. But so 
often there were notes (oh ! how she dreaded 
those dreadful notes ; they seemed to be forever 
due) ; or he was "hard pushed ;" or, at last, 
he exclaimed : '' Dove-eyes, I must say that I 
think you spend some money unnecessarily, and 
not with the best judgment in the world." As 
he went over the little account of personal ex- 
penditures, he found : " Charity, 50 cents." 
'' Just now, charity, with us, must begin and 
end at home," he exclaimed. This was too 
much for Dove-eyes. The first time that he 
had ever rebuked her with real harshness. She 
poured floods of tears upon baby's head, in the 
little cupboard aloft where she rocked him, un- 
til even baby grew loving and dumb under 
the piteous shower-bath. Dove-eyes never asks 
Alexis for money now for any personal want 
whatever ; though, in an abundant home, the 
want of it is a perpetual thorn in her heart. 
Amid plenty, she has not a penny that she can 
call her own, to expend as she pleases without 
rendering an account to her husband. Poor 
Alexis ! He meant all that he said in the happy 



PIN-MONEY. 181 

honeymoon days about " anticipating lier every 
want." He intended to do so then. He intends 
to do so still. Only, what man ever lived who, 
by virtue of his masculinity, could anticipate 
every need of a woman ? As a bachelor, with- 
out an atom of personal experience in that di- 
rection, he thought it would be delightful to 
anticipate and provide for every want of his 
lovely wife. How much the most economical 
of woman's needs might cost he had not the 
remotest idea. 

Alas ! Dove-eyes' needs, in a very great 
degree, only represent the wants of the house- 
hold, the never-ending, ceaseless demand of the 
family. To supply these always, smilingly, 
spontaneously, ungrudgingly, under the stress 
of difficulty, of business losses and business 
worry, was not so easy. What wonder that, 
amid all, the personal needs of the woman were 
at last lost and overlooked altogether. Yet 
never for a moment has Alexis meant to be. 
other than generous to his wife. The failure 
lies not in his intention, but in his fashion of 
carrying it out. If in the beginning he had 
said : " Dove-eyes, we are not rich : but, with 
care and thrift and God's blessing, we may be- 
come so. My average income is so much ; let 
us divide it. Here is so much per year toward 



182 OUTLINES, 

the payment of our home, so much for table, 
with a margin for hospitality. Another (how- 
ever small) for charity and for the rainy day. 
So much for personal expenses, yours and mine. 
Here is your pin-money, Dove-eyes. It is j^ours 
absolutely. I shall never ask how you have 
spent it, or if you have spent it at all ; but I 
shall pay you your share just as regularly and 
promptly as I would any other equal partner. 
As we are prosperous, it shall be increased to 
the limit of my ability. Our home is deeded 
to you. Whatever may happen to me, you and 
the children will not be homeless." What a 
proud and happy Dove-eyes she would have 
been ! What an impulse, what an incentive 
would have been given her to cultivate pru- 
dence, wisdom, and economy in this proof that 
her husband trusted her, and acknowledged 
her his equal partner in the life-long home 
company. 

' As it is, Alexis wonders, with all his efforts 
to make her happy, that Dove-eyes should so 
often look worn and unhappy. Sickness, the 
care of her children, the natural wear and tear 
of human life, cannot account for all the sadness 
looking forth from her soft eyes. Dove-eyes is 
very much in love with Alexis still. There are 
a hundred traits in his character to make and 



PIN-MONEY. 183 

keep her in this all-suffering state. She never 
misses an opportunity to tell her friends that he 
is the " best man in the world." She believes 
it, though she often makes the assertion with a 
little inward sigh, which nothing outside of her 
own heart hears. Yet, with all her love and 
his, there is a shadow on their wedded lives, 
which justice, just a little justice, added to the 
love, could lift and disperse forever. 

Alexis would think it most outrageous if 
Dove-eyes were to call him to an account for 
every penny he chooses to spend for cigars, for 
newspapers (whose unnecessary and unmanage- 
able accumulation is a household nuisance), for 
his soda-water, his '' treats " to his friends, in 
which she has no share ; his hundred unaccount- 
able ways of spending money, in which mascu- 
linity delights and for which it never renders 
account. 

If Dove-eyes called him to account (which 
she never did), how he would resent it ! '' Isn't 
it my money ? Don't I earn it ? I shall spend 
it as I please ! " That is just what the man in 
him would say ; and in these words all his 
man's injustice to the woman whom he loves 
would come in — "my money," not "our 
money." Dove-eyes works. She works hard, 
without wages. She does not earn money. " I 



184 OUTLINES. 

give it to her," says tliis munificent Alexis. " I 
mean to be a liberal as well as loving husband, 
and give ker all of my money that she needs. 
How much she needs, and for what she needs it 
I am to be the judge. To be sure, she cannot 
judge for me — how much I am to use as a per- 
son, or for what purpose I am to use it. It is 
not her right. I am man and master, and earn 
it ; and shall say just how every cent of it shall 
be spent." 

In all that she has suffered and borne for 
him, in the constant care and toil of years, the 
wisdom, the self-denial, the economy with which 
she has saved and garnered what he provided 
— has she earned less than he ? 

Even if this were possible, in giving herself, 
her life, her love, her devotion for all time to 
him, did she not relinquish forever the oppor- 
tunity to earn or to accumulate for herself per- 
sonally in any other profession ? Does he owe 
her nothing for that ? In choosing the highest 
of any profession on earth to woman — that of 
the wife and mother, as her husband's partner 
in every home interest — should he treat her 
with fitful indulgence, even in little things, or 
with the tender honor due to an equal ? Dove- 
eyes feels that their home is "her husband's 
house." She doesn't feel at liberty to spend one 



PIN-MONEY, 185 

shilling out of tlie common fund for any charity 
or any purpose dear to herself, because she must 
tell Alexis, and she is almost sure that he would 
find fault, or hint at her lack of judgment, till 
she would be altogether miserable; and sure, 
judging by treatment received, that she was per- 
sonally little more than a mendicant in her hus- 
band's home of plenty. 

There are many Dove-eyes. There are many 
Grand Dukes, whose name is not Alexis. Yet 
men marvel at the unrest of American women, 
and discourse with great eloquence and igno- 
rance on the subject. 

Let me astonish you anew, gentlemen, by as- 
suring you that the lack of pin-money is at the 
bottom of much of it. Dove-eyes will never do 
any such thing ; but thousands of women do. 
They start off in the most unthought of tan- 
gents. '' Anything, anything," they say, " that 
brain or fingers can devise, whereby I may earn 
a httle money that will be my very own, that I 
can do as I please with, unchallenged, or with- 
out any man telling me that he gave it to me, 
and that I must do just as he says with it or 
do without it." 

Not a man in the world, no matter how just, 
how generous he is, can know how much his 
wife (and the more sensitive and delicate she is 



186 OUTLINES. 

the more so) must sometimes suffer tlirough the 
very fact of financial dependence. You may be 
truly the best husband in the world ; as a rule, 
she may be glad that all her temporal blessings 
flow to her through you ; and yet there will be 
times when she will suffer through this con- 
dition most keenly — when she would gladly 
part with her dearest treasure to possess a little 
money utterly her own, which she might use for 
some purpose dear to her heart, without asking 
any mortal for it as a gift. My dear brethren 
of mankind, do you not see how much misery 
you can make and can unmake in your own 
homes ? After all, his use of money seems to 
be the utmost test of a man's manhood ? Touch 
his money-nerve, and you measure him in al- 
most every other direction. Yet remember, it 
is not so much the amount of money you share, 
it is your way of sharing it, which makes her 
happy or unhappy. 

When you are tempted to patronize j^otir 
wife, to make her feel in any ignoble way her 
dependence on you, if you could but remember 
one thing — that the true woman who gives 
herself for life to be the wife of the best of men, 
to love him, to suffer for him, to bear from him 
all that a woman must, to toil and suffer for his 
children, places him under a debt of gratitude 



PIN-MONEY, . 187 

whicli no money on eartli can repay ! Consider- 
ate care, love, honor, and justice can be the 
only recompense. To be sure, you are a Grand 
Duke. Nobody denies that ; you have only to 
prove the patent to your rank. Leave your wife 
to be Grand Duchess, and in her own realm 
(which, surely, is not yours) let her reign with 
equal freedom and in equal justice sovereign 
over her own pin-money. Justice in the house- 
hold coequal with love will do more than ten 
thousand treatises to quell the public outcry 
and soothe into peace the just discontent of 
women. 



XVIII. 

BREADMAKING. 

'' Man cannot live by bread alone," it has 
been written ; yet it is very certain that he can- 
not live without it, and is but a poor creature if 
it is not of good quality. This is what ails half 
the men we meet. The women who pretend to 
take care of them, and complain so much because 
they have to do it, feed them on such wretched 
bread, to say nothing of their other edibles, 
that no wonder they are thin, yellow, haggard, 
jerkey, and don't beheve in " woman's rights." 
It is perfectly natural, if a man sees that the 
woman he knows best has reached no high 
standard of excellence in the arts peculiarly her 
own, that he should doubt the capacity of all 
women to fill the higher callings which even 
now open but a contested sphere to their ambi- 
tion and ejQfort. My good sisters, if you wish to 
convert these masculine creatures to your most 
progressive ideas, you must begin by feeding 
them on good bread, which beginning will prob- 
ably involve the necessity of knowing yourself 



BREADMAKING. 189 

how to make it and bake it. Make it with your 
own hands ; sponge it, mould it, bake it, this 
poetic bread — fine celled, white, tender, and 
sweet. Stir it, beat it, and bake it, this still 
more delicious bread — brown, fragrant, life- 
feeding, full of fibre for bone, full of phosphorus 
for brain. With this perfect bread build up the 
muscular, nutritive, and nerve systems of this 
perturbed mortal, who does not believe in your 
'' rights " ; and when you have thoroughly ^' re- 
constructed " him on a sanitary basis, he will de- 
clare to you of his own accord : " Do anything, 
be anything you can. I make no objections, pro- 
viding you continue to feed me on ambrosial 
bread. It is fit for the gods." But, my poor 
brethren of mankind, when I meditate on the 
concoctions of saleratus, grease, and vicious 
acids of all sorts which are given you to replen- 
ish the lost atoms of your material bodies, though 
it may not be in my power to admire you, I 
could both pity and pardon any mental or moral 
obliquity of which you might be guilty. The 
human blood cannot be fed with poisons, or 
even mth indigestible food, and yet the brain 
and heart maintain strong and healthy action. 
In knocking about the world, how long we live 
and how far we go to eat one piece of superla- 
tive bread. Among the Arabs poor bread is a 
cause in law for divorce. 



190 OUTLINES. 

Breadmaking in its perfection has become al- 
most one of the lost arts. 

Is there any other people who take such infi- 
nite pains to be fine, and so httle to be comfort- 
able ! One cause for this is that all household 
service for women has fallen into disrepute. 
Tlie science of domestic economy, than which 
none requires finer qualities of brain and heart, 
is now entirely ignored, under the contemptuous 
epithet of '' drudgery," from which the chief ob- 
ject of a woman's life must be to escape. One of 
the most mischievous qualities of this ignorance 
is that it is usually very proud of itself. I know 
the matron of a public institution, who thinks it 
very vulgar and unladylike to think or to know 
anything about your food before you sit down 
to it. One result of her sensibility is, that the 
amount of hot saleratus-cakes, sour and leathery 
bread, greasy and dried-up meats demolished 
in this institution are appalling to contemplate. 
Appalling because of the numbers of teachers, 
young, half-fed girls, and orphaned httle chil- 
dren who sicken and die for lack of nourish- 
ing bread and seasonable fruits, while there is 
enough worse than wasted in food that cannot 
be eaten to procure both. This institution is 
supervised by wealthy and intelligent women, 
who supply everything for its inmates but prop- 



BREADMAKING. 191 

erly cooked food. Probably it never occurred to 
them to ask the matron if she ever visits the 
kitchen. She does a great deal of praying ; 
which is excellent so far as it goes, but never 
went so far yet as to take the place of practice. 
I believe religiously in the thorough physical 
and intellectual education of girls. But that girl 
is not educated, who, having mastered every 
other science, is totally ignorant of the chemical 
properties of a perfect loaf of bread ; and who 
cannot, upon necessity, make such a loaf with 
her own hands. The gauge of education is not 
what we have studied ; it is that which our 
learning has made us. The only measure of dis- 
ciphne is its result. " What am I ? what can I 
do ? what can I be for my own help and the help 
of others ? " is the first question which every 
young woman, on leaving school, should ask. 
The most that the average girl who leaves the 
average boarding-school can answer is, that she 
is " finished." She is finished. Her digestive 
organs are finished, her nerve system is finished, 
her poor little muscles are finished, her feeble 
brain is nearly finished. She is an overwrought, 
hysterical, dyspeptic creature. She subsists on 
pickles and preserves, hot cakes, strong coffee 
and tea, and over-spiced meats. She has no 
domestic nor physical education. She violates, 



192 OUTLINES. 

without knowing it, the laws of human health 
every hour of her life. Without one atom of the 
development necessary to fulfill the true duties 
of a womanly life, she is told, perhaps, by her 
" pa" that her '' sphere is home," and that she 
must stay there. No noble ambition, no useful 
employment, no sweet home duties fill her days. 
She spends most of her time crimping her hair, 
eating candy, writing gushing letters, and dress- 
ing for the coming man ; or she sits from morn- 
ing till night in a cushioned chair embroidering 
slippers and smoking-caps for this possible hus- 
band; or she may study a French cook book 
long enough to learn how to make a fancy cake 
or concoction whereby to woo him through an 
epicurean stomach, with an accompanying, " I 
made it." But where is the maid whose mat- 
rimonial line — whose pretty covert, " Please 
marry me, sir," — is ever baited with a good 
honest loaf of bread, kneaded and baked by 
her own hands ? Instead of deeming it a deg- 
radation or a misfortune that she does not 
know enough to take care of her health under 
ordinary circumstances, it is the supreme delight 
of her existence to be '' in the hands of her phy- 
sician," and to enjoy the perpetual felicities of 
being '^ delicate." ''I am so delicate," said a 
girl to me, in the same tone in which she would 



BREADMAKING. 193 

have said, " I am so happy." " My daughter 
is so delicate," we hear mothers exclaim. From 
watering-place to water-cure, they go about 
with their languishing burdens. It is " my 
daughter," " my daughter," everywhere, al- 
ways ; her weakness her delicacy, her innumer- 
able ailments. It never occurs to these anx- 
ious women that this very daughter is a living 
protest against their own ignorance and inad- 
equacy to fulfill the first duty of motherhood. 
And here I make no allusion to inherited or 
constitutional disorders, to which all may be 
innocently liable ; but the functional ill-health 
caused solely by false habits, false food, and ig- 
norance of the laws of physical life. The trouble 
is, it is fashionable to be delicate. A certain 
undefined reproach is attached to robust health. 
To be really elegant, really intellectual, accord- 
ing to the accepted standard you must look " del- 
icate." There are men as well as women who 
believe that a certain appearance of sickliness is 
indicative of high intellectuality ; as if a torpid 
liver could ever supply blood and brain as weU 
as an active one. What is worse, the odor of 
sanctity has attached itself to wretched health. 
At one time dyspepsia was a synonym for piety, 
because nearly all clergymen had it. And eter- 
nity alone will reveal the numbers of feeble and 

13 



194 OUTLINES. 

frightful sermons wHcli have been born of the 
pickles and preserves fermenting together in the 
dyspeptic stomachs of good men. And it will 
take the same limitless length of duration to 
inform the women of the world how much 
they have done toward making clergymen an 
enervated and sickly race of men, by the indi- 
gestible mass of goodies with which the individ- 
ual woman of all generations has persisted in 
piling the plate of her '' beloved pastor." All 
the early saints were " ashamed of their bod- 
ies ; " and if many modern ones are not, they 
ought to be. It was centuries before Christ 
that the heathen Plotinus first declared himself 
ashamed of his. After such cycles of time and 
of knowledge have passed, it is a mournful fact 
that so many Christians ought to be ashamed of 
theirs for the same cause. The only pride which 
the Latin Fathers took in theirs was in de- 
claring what wretched tabernacles they were of 
parchment skin, and bones that would scarcely 
hold together. Ever since their day, saints and 
sinners, each according to their fashion, have 
done their best to punish and degrade the body 
— the fair and marvelous human home which 
God deems fit for an immortal spirit. Yet the 
first hope of the race lies in the purity and perfec- 
tion of the body. A brain of remarkable organ- 



BREADMAKING. 195 

ization may accomplisli vast results for a time, 
in defiance of vitiated blood and disordered 
functions. But the most powerful brain, the 
most exquisite nerve-life, cannot long exist un- 
aided by an adequate muscular and nutritive 
system. A mind perfectly powerful and har- 
monious cannot inhabit a diseased and morbid 
body. If, as a nation of dyspeptics, whose 
brains flourish at the raw expense of their vital 
forces, Americans have accomplished so much, 
what would be the ratio of their performance 
if their mental and physical development were 
commensurate ? This brings us back to our 
breadmaking — to bread as the deepest root 
from which must grow the perfect flower of 
body and brain. Never was a nation fed on 
more wretchedly-made bread than ours. This 
is man's wrong ; woman inflicts it. A man may 
build a bigger ship than a woman ever can ; 
but he never can make better bread than she 
can, if she only will. Do you ask me if I be- 
lieve in woman drudgery ? Never. Extreme 
poverty involves a degree of drudgery which 
can never be escaped. 

God knows that there are poor, overworked 
women whom no earthly power can help, unless 
He lift from their weary shoulders their too 
heavy burdens. I am not talking to them ; 



196 OUTLINES. 

but to the woman who, with ordinary health 
and adequate means of support, yet regards all 
household care as so much '' drudgery," which, 
in proportioil to her '' sense of superiority," she 
must escape. If you are a drudge, it is not 
because you are mistress of a house or a fam- 
ily ; but because, being both, you lack the edu- 
cation, the discipline, the devotion which only 
can make you adequate to the highest duty and 
dearest delight which can devolve on woman. 
You are a drudge because you are too ignorant, 
too indolent, or too indifferent to impart to 
your servant the simplest lessons of intelligent 
domestic service. Your house is disorderly, 
your food vrretched. You fret, you complain, 
you cry. Your husband scolds, perhaps swears. 
You are all sickly. Your doctor bills are 
enormous. Your sole consolation consists in 
exchanging miseries with your female friends. 
Suppose you possess the practical knowledge 
to teach your servant how to prepare every 
dish necessary to a perfectly supplied table ; 
suppose you often made with your own hands 
its white and brown and golden bread ; suppose 
you devoted the time which you now spend in 
crying and complaining in studying practical 
hygiene and chemistry in their relations to 
cooking (even then you would not be fright- 



BREADMAKING. 197 

fully wise) ; suppose you gave the time now 
consumed in nursing your sick children to stud- 
ying the laws which govern their little bodies, 
in learning the properties of the food necessary 
to their nourishment ; suppose you spent one 
quarter of the money which now goes to the 
doctor, in securing them healthful amusements, 
and the time which you now devote to worrying 
your husband to mutual recreation and compan- 
ionship ; would you be more or less of a drudge 
than you are now ? There is something false 
and wicked in the cry which denounces the 
domestic duties of women as such^ which must 
finally react upon and destroy itself. Let us 
exalt our homes, if we would exalt ourselves, our 
children, or the man whom we love. If we have 
a home, let us deny the idea and prove it false in 
our own personality that it is necessary/ to go 
higher than that home, to neglect its duties, to 
ignore its privileges, in order to secure the most 
harmonious development, the widest culture, the 
profoundest influence. 

The increase and perfection of machinery- 
have taken the distaff and the needle from the 
hands of women. The decrease of marriages, 
the changes in scientific and intellectual opin- 
ion, are among the causes which every day are 
opening and widening the employments and 



198 OUTLINES. 

opportunities of tliat large and constantly in- 
creasing class of women who are entirely depen- 
dent upon their ov^n efforts and attainments, not 
only for their subsistence, but for their place 
as human beings in the world. What just 
mind will say that all legal disabilities should 
not be removed from their way ? that every em- 
ployment and profession should not be opened 
to them, to fill according to their culture and 
capacity ? The world-wide change now going 
on in the condition of women is but the natural 
result of the primal law of growth and fruition. 
Womanhood has not yet grown to its perfect 
prime, has not yet borne its most consummate 
flower. Growth and fruition do not involve 
chaos or destruction ; but law and order, har- 
mony and love. Then how querulous and 
weak the outcry of fear for an impossible 
future. No change can outpass its natural 
limit. No change can wash away the inefface- 
able life-marks, rooted in human experience, the 
indestructible affections of the human heart, 
eternal in their life, as the law and order of 
God. 

When woman ceases to be imprisoned by 
necessity in a house falsely called a home ; 
when she is no longer compelled to live in it a 
slave for the mere chance of material subsist- 



BREADMAKING. 199 

ence ; then she will gladly turn from the outer 
turmoil of the world to a true home as her best 
refuge and surest chance for happiness. Then 
she will realize, as she never realized before, 
that to make that home all that it should be, 
all that it may be, demands not only the graces 
of the heart, but the highest intellectual gifts 
which a human being can cultivate. 

To-day, that woman who brings the ripened 
powers of a rich and disciplined intellect to the 
ordering of every department of her household ; 
who makes her home the centre of light, beauty, 
and intelligence, drawing the weary and the 
homeless into its radiance ; she who every 
morning sends forth into the world a brave and 
happy man ; who every day gathers into her 
rejoicing arms joyous and beautiful children; 
she who from the exceeding riches of her life 
and love gives, yet is not impoverished ; who, 
doing, being this, is a free woman, — free in 
body, free in brain, free in spirit, free in the 
largest right of her humanity, — she is the 
crowned, the triumphant, the blessed woman. 



XIX. 

OUR KITCHENS. 

" Cooperative kitchens ! " Heaven for- 
bid ! Heaven probably will not interfere ; but 
surely women will. If there never was a house 
large enough for two families, there never will 
be a kitchen large enough for a dozen. It is 
not strange that some women want to get rid 
of their kitchens, such looking and smelling dens 
as they are, and will always remain. Cowper 
sung " The Sofa," and glorified the teacup. I 
proclaim the kitchen, with a hearty desire to 
rescue it from its abused condition. It is non- 
sense for men to bemoan their grandmothers, 
because they spun and wove, while we do 
neither. If they worked perpetually, you may 
be sure that it was because they had to, not be- 
cause they wanted to do so. They would have 
been just as glad to have availed themselves of 
steam-looms and sewing-machines as a refuge 
from endless drudgery as their granddaughters, 
if they had only had them. Yet it would be 
vastly better for our generation if we consulted 



OUR KITCHENS. 201 

those dear old ladies oftener than we do ; better 
if we imitated them more closely, not in their 
piety only, which on the whole was of too self- 
abnegating a sort, for it did injustice to some 
of the best powers which God had given them 
and increased the depravity of man in making 
a bigger tjrrant of him than even nature in- 
tended. But there is no 'danger of our imitat- 
ing them too nearly in their personal interest 
in their kitchens. It is for the woman of the 
nineteenth century to hold in her development 
the equal balance of physical and mental cul- 
ture. She cannot do this and neglect her 
kitchen. No matter how far at times she may 
rise above it, it will always do her good to come 
back to it ; and, if it is the kitchen that it ought 
to be, she will ever feel dehght in returning to 
its homely brightness and savory smells. I am 
sorry for that woman who does not treasure in 
her heart somewhere the memory of a beloved 
kitchen. Perhaps it was grandmother's kitchen, 
or mother's. ]\Iay be it was in the country. 
You can hardly be happier in heaven than 
when you played on its floor a little child. I 
love such a kitchen ; not the discarded one of a 
fine villa, but the honored kitchen of a thrifty 
farm-house. It faces the east, and takes the 
sun's first " good-morning." Thus its busiest 



202 OUTLINES. 

hours are full of brightness, and its restful 
afternoons full of ' serene light and peaceful 
shadows. Its wide door opens on a grassy 
yard, where " the old oaken bucket hangs in 
the well." What a yard it is! Its clovery 
grass is a paradise for bleaching ; its irregular 
paths run through the dandelions down to the 
garden whose luscious vegetables offer a daily 
market for the ready hand, and out to the 
orchard where the ruddy apples hang. There 
ifi an old lilac bush by one window, a sweet-brier 
by the other, while morning-glory bells cluster 
about both. Beside one is a stand full of 
plants, which in the winter flourish in the 
morning sun. On its ledge there is a work 
basket — a marvelous basket — into whose 
depths I sometimes dive, through piles of stock- 
ings, through bundles and bags, through scissors 
and thimbles and pins, down to a needle-book 
(certain to be at the bottom, if only through 
my impetuous poking), in whose pocket I am 
sure to find a whole literature of domestic rec- 
ipes, heart-poems, and editorials on the state of 
the nation. Beside it is a httle old chair with 
a warm cushion. This is the mother's chair 
and this the mother's corner, and not to be in- 
vaded. Then the old kitchen has a deep fire- 
place, a vast bake-oven, and a modern stove. 



OUR KITCHENS, 203 

It has a great pantry, whose wide shelves are 
filled with glittering milk-pans, all set for cream ; 
and a store-room, in which you may find every- 
thing for cheer, from the barrels of flour and 
sugar, the rows of sweetmeats, dear to every 
housewife's heart, to bunches of dried catnip 
hung up for the cat, and pennyroyal enough 
for every stomach-aching baby in town. The 
old kitchen floor is painted a clear gray, bright- 
ened by gay home-made mats. It has a deep- 
throated clock, that rules its days ; a book-rack 
filled with books and newspapers, and colored 
prints on its walls. It has an arm-chair, a sew- 
ing-chair, and a chintz-covered lounge. There 
is nothing in it too fine for its place. It is only 
a kitchen, after all, yet a joy to behold and to 
enjoy. 

There is a parlor in this house, proud in a 
bright grandmother-made carpet, of the most 
intense stripes ; in haircloth furniture, as shin- 
ing as a beetle's back ; in a profuse pile of old 
daguerreotypes and a new photograph book. On 
its walls old gentlemen sit in venerable frames, 
with high collars, stiff enough to break their 
necks ; and old ladies sit in others, in mutf on- 
leg sleeves and bristling caps, who look down 
with mild severity on the chignons of their 
descendants. When the minister comes, or 



204 OUTLINES, 

the children from town, this parlor is opened 
and furbished. But, somehow, sooner or later 
all the company gravitate back into the old 
kitchen ; for the glow, the cheer, the love are 
. there. 

Then I am in love with a kitchen in town. 
If it is not as poetic as the country kitchen, it 
is more convenient. My heart has thrilled with 
delight at the sight of its bright yellow floor, 
and exulted with conscious thrift while I turned 
the faucets of its '' stationary tubs," and tested 
the virtues of its " spacious range." Who can 
portray the splendor of its pantry — its mugs 
and jugs ; its " nests " of polished boxes, whose 
covers shut in the priceless berries and spices of 
the East; its rows of glass jars, filled with 
glowing jellies — the ruby of the raspberry, 
the purple of the blackberry, the crimson of 
the currant ; its shelves of canned fruits ? 
There are peaches for you ; tomatoes for you; 
sweet corn in this can that will give you succo- 
tash in January, and delude you with the make- 
believe of an August feast. This kitchen's 
window lets in the sunshine ; and its back-door 
opens on a grassy plot, on which the clothes 
may bleach, the dog may play, or the baby 
roll. And all around the stone walks runs a 
border of flowers : and, if morning-glories don't 



OUR KITCHENS, 205 

hang on the window, they do on the fence. 
There are but few city back-doors which do not 
open on a yard as large as this. vShow to me 
one pure with grass, fragrant with blossoms ; or 
show me one nauseous with the debris and ref- 
use of the house, and I will tell you the sort 
of people who abide inside. You tell me that 
my kitchen is not practical ? That I don't 
personally know about it ? I know all about 
it; which is more than I can say of anything 
else. I know that every kitchen must have its 
soapy days, its sudsy days, its codfishy days, 
and even its cabbagy days — that, in spite of 
its posies and spices, its odors must sometimes 
be more pungent than pleasant ; but I know 
also that we may open the windows, let the bad 
air out and the blessed air in, and that through 
and beyond everything remains the kitchen, all 
that it should be, or nothing that it should be, 
just as we have made it ! Everybody knows the 
charm of a pleasant parlor. Every woman likes 
to display her taste and refinement in it, accord- 
ing to her means or culture. All its pretty nick- 
nacks have a price for her heart which no money 
could pay. Its statuettes and pictures, its soft 
sofas and chairs, give us the refreshment of 
beauty and the proffer of rest when the day's 
work is done. The parlor is the crown of the 



206 OUTLINES. , 

home ; but the kitchen is its heart. In the par- 
lor may bloom the flower of its culture ; but the 
root of its comfort is in the kitchen. The parlor 
may reveal to us the exact standard of a wo- 
man's taste ; but the unerring interpretation of 
her disposition is the kitchen. Wealth or circum- 
stance may place the actual labor and duty of 
your daily life outside of your kitchen. Trained 
servants may make it unnecessary that you 
should fulfill its daily tasks with your own 
hands. But has it ever occurred to you that, 
however exempt yourself, some woman's life is 
lived in your kitchen, and how much you may 
add to that life by making your kitchen a pleas- 
ant place to inhabit ? She is no less a woman 
in all her native susceptibilities and needs be- 
cause she is poor and does your work. Do you 
realize how much every life takes on of the hue 
of its surroundings ? And what a minister of 
good as well as a minister of beauty you may 
be when you make your kitchen perfect as a 
kitchen^ as you have already made your parlor 
as a parlor ? It cannot be measured, the 
wretched health, the morbidness, the misery, 
the vice even, which have had their birth in the 
dark, unventilated dens which are called kitch- 
ens, in which so many women drag on their 
weary lives. And when the girl of our time 



OUR KITCHENS. 207 

grows up to regard the kitchen of her home as 
something more than a hole to be shunned, in 
which Bridget was born to drudge ; when she 
brings into it, instead, her caUco apron and 
smihng face ; when she devotes to its service a 
portion of the cultivated powers now wasted in 
idleness, if not in sin, we' shall see the begin- 
ning of that royal race of women for whom we 
longingly wait and in whose advent we so de- 
voutly believe. 



XX. 

CASTE IN SEX. 
I. 

IN KNOWLEDGE. 

Aeteh the disastrous result of Eve's first 
nibble at the apple of the tree of knowledge, 
and the awful penalty which it entailed upon 
her daughters, it is not wonderful that for many 
centuries they were too frightened to follow her 
example. Nor should we fail in charity to the 
sons of Adam (no one of whom is over fond of 
work) to say that together they have done their 
best to shut away the forbidden fruit of wis- 
dom from their sisters, in bitter remembrance 
of that first taste which cost Adam his spiritual 
supremacy and fore-doomed every son of his to 
the curse of labor. At any rate, ever since that 
unlucky beginning man has done his best to 
keep woman in ignorance ; and, after having 
met with a very tolerable success in so doing, 
with a charming and characteristic inconsist- 
ency, he now declares that her lack of acquired 
knowledge is the sign and seal of her mental 



CASTE IN SEX. — IN KNO WLEDGE. 209 

inferiority to himself. In this arrogant declara- 
tion he does not take cognizance of the fact that 
through all the earlier ages of human existence 
it was physictil force which held in abeyance 
the brain and soul of the human race. The 
creature the physically weaker was the subject 
creature. In its abject condition intellect, spir- 
ituality, aspiration went for naught. Out of 
man's primal brutahty, out of his instinctive, 
unrestrained appetite, muscle, and will, every 
form of human servitude, every shade of human 
ignorance has grown, 

" At the beginning the earth was without form and 
void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. 
The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the 
waters. God said, Let there he light, and there was^ 
lightr 

The physical chaos of creation was not deeper 
or more dreadful than the mental and moral 
chaos which succeeded the Fall of Man. We 
are just emerging from it. We have not yet 
escaped it. But to-day, as at the beginning, it 
is Spirit brooding over Matter — illuminating, 
inspiring, triumphing over it — which brings 
light into this troubled world. Two forces 
have always pervaded the universe : the un- 
seen and the seen, the material and the spirit- 
ual. Man represents the material, woman the 

14 



210 OUTLINES. 

spiritual — the masculine and the feminine. 
These forces are but just beginning to reign 
together in equihbrium. Man has been wo- 
man's master because he has been the physic- 
ally stronger. Woman is ceasing to be man's 
slave, because, in the equal development of the 
human race, brain and soul in her are coming 
to prevail over the merely selfish and material 
in him. To-day the manliest man would be 
ashamed to look into the eyes of the woman by 
his side and tell her that he is the master, be- 
cause he could knock her down with perfect 
ease, and break her bones with much greater 
facility than she could his. And yet, out of 
man's brute nature, out of that most ignoble 
in himself, has come his loudest assumption of 
superiority, his longest and lowest tyranny. 
Everj^ da}'' the human race is moving further 
and further away from the supremacy of brute 
power. Yet long ages to come must pass be- 
fore woman can outgrow, mentally or morally, 
the marks of her manacles. The man born and 
bred a slave, even if freed, never loses wholly 
the feeling or manner of a slave. The woman 
born to physical subjection and degradation can 
never seek or use knowledge as her birthright. 
Never till she holds her sex in honor, as man 
holds his, can she be his equal, even in her own 



CASTE IN SEX. -^ IN KNOWLEDGE. 211 

realm. The deepest insult which can be shown 
to a human being is to associate it solely with 
material functions, with no cognizance and no 
consideration of its intellectual and spiritual 
power. This insult, through all ages, man has 
offered to woman. That it has come from man 
proves his inferiority to her in the very element 
of her nature which he ignores and insults. She 
has ever delighted to honor him in his loft- 
iest attributes. She pays homage to his intel- 
lect, his soul. She worships in him something 
beyond sex, which will live glorious forever. 
While she, reaching out through every impulse 
of her heart, to the sweetest in human affection, 
through every faculty of her brain, to the high- 
est in nature and art — she to him has been 
chiefly the creature of his pleasure. Being this, 
whenever and howsoever she has proved her- 
self to be morCf by so much he has deemed 
himself defrauded, and proclaimed loudly that 
she had outleaped her sphere. Man, mighty in 
brute power, and by that enthralled to his 
senses, through it has made woman his subject 
and slave. That he might make her these 
more utterly, he began by declaring that she 
had no soul. She was naught but a body, and 
that body was his. Struggling, aspiring under 
such a ban, do you marvel that woman through 



212 OUTLINES. 

soul and brain has wrought Httle ? Marvel 
more that she has wrought anything. China 
boasts of the most ancient civilization of earth. 
Its system of scholarship is the most minute, 
intense, and exhaustive in the world. Yet, 
within a year an imperial mandate has gone 
forth that no Christian teacher can open with- 
in its walls a school for women; that every 
one already established shall be closed. Is it 
strange that the Chinese woman believes that, 
if true to certain vows while living, after death 
she will return to earth in the form of a man ? 
To her, with his immunities, that seems reward 
enough for all she suffers or loses here. Athens, 
the home of beauty, the focus of learning, of 
art, of aesthetic amusement, of pohtical freedom, 
worshipping the form of woman on every shrine, 
made her a prisoner in every home. Every 
Greek pulse thrilled with life and action ; every 
Greek heart throbbed strong with the passion 
of freedom ; every Greek eye craved the divine 
harmony of beauty ; yet the Athenian woman, 
within sight of all, yearning for all, embodying 
all, was shut into a sordid, slavish existence, 
or seized freedom and culture at the price of 
infamy. An Athenian, in open court, telling 
how good a husband he was, began in this 
wise : '' As a husband I rendered her situation 



CASTE IN SEX, —IN KNOWLEDGE. 213 

agreeable, but as a woman she was left neither 
the mistress of her fortune nor of her own 
actions." 

Nearly three hundred years ago a young girl 
in Dijon, France, conceived the insane and pro- 
fane idea that even girls should learn the alpha- 
bet. She appealed to her father, who was a 
member of the Provincial Parliament; and he 
consulted four doctors of law, who decided that 
it was " a demoniacal work for girls " either to 
teach or to learn the alphabet. Whereupon 
the sons of Dijon arose in riot, and stoned 
Fran9oise de Saintonges for her wicked designs 
upon the understandings of her sisters. She, 
nothing daunted, took fifty Uvres, all she had, 
hired a httle house, and with five other maid- 
ens entered it. It took all her money to pay 
her rent. " We have no beds," she said ; " but 
we spend our nights in prayer," The craven 
father relented sufficiently to send from his 
abundant table cold victuals for herself and 
maidens. They went on from the alphabet to 
learn many other things. Twelve years from 
that day on which they were stoned Dijon held 
high carnival in their honor. Forth from their 
humble house walked a hundred maidens, clothed 
in white, while the bells of the city rang and the 
people strewed flowers in their pathway. They 



214 OUTLINES. 

were preceded by the entire Provincial Parlia- 
ment, and by all tbe soldiers of the province, 
to the stately building which stands to-day in 
Dijon, a monument to the everlasting glory of 
Fran^oise de Saintonges. 

The first thing that the Pilgrims did, after 
planting themselves in Boston, was to found 
a school for boys. Their sisters cried so loud 
for the forbidden fruit of knowledge that the 
city elders were induced to open a high school. 
Immediately its doors were thronged. With 
ninety-nine boys two hundred eighty-six girls 
appeared as candidates. Worse — after the al- 
phabet and figures, they aspired to Latin and 
Euclid. The city council met, and resolved 
that this immoderate zeal for knowledge was 
too much for the man-nature to bear. In eigh- 
teen months the school was finally closed, be- 
cause of its multitude of scholars of the pro- 
scribed sex. 

Yet no less a woman was the first instigator 
of Harvard College. Lucy Downing, imbued 
with the caste of sex into which she was born, 
was one of the ten thousand women who sacri- 
ficed themselves and their daughters for their 
sons. She was the sister of Governor Win- 
throp, of Massachusetts, and sent her daughters 
into service, and lived poorly and meanly her- 



CASTE IN SEX. — IN KNO WLEDGE. 215 

self, that '' her George " might be educated. 
In October, 1636, she wrote from London to 
her brother, the Governor : " If God should 
call me, I could go far nimbler to New England 
if a college could be established there, which, in 
my opinion, would put no small life into the 
plantation, besides being of incalculable benefit 
to George. The result of this sisterly appeal 
was that in 1636 the General Court of Boston 
voted four hundred pounds to a college, to be 
established in Cambridge. In 1640, second on 
the list of the. first graduating class was George 
Downing, the nephew of Governor Winthrop. 
George Downing lived to serve with distinction 
under Cromwell ; to be a " turn-coat " under 
the Stuarts ; a baronet, and " a great man," 
who snubbed his mother and refused her money 
when, at the age of seventy-three, she asked 
him for it. It was then that she wrote to one 
of the sisters whom she had put out to service 
for the sake of this brother : " Your brother 
George has bought another totvn^ but more your 
brother George will not hear of for me. He 
says that it is only covetousness that makes me 
ask for more." Yet in his unfilial thankless- 
ness George Downing did not differ in spirit 
from thousands of learned professors and popu- 
lar ministers of the present day, who, having 



216 OUTLINES, 

been educated at the cost of devout women, who 
had left their own daughters untaught to edu- 
cate other people's sons, now shut in the faces 
of women the doors of the very colleges which 
could never have existed without them. 



n. 

IN EDUCATION. 

• After the fate of the first Boston high school 
open to girls, it can hardly be accepted as proof 
that the Boston woman was intellectually the 
inferior of the Boston man, because as late as 
the day of John Adams, while Harvard College 
lavished all its opportunity of education upon 
him, she was denied the privilege almost of 
learning how to spell. Barely to read and write 
decently, with the knowledge of dancing, at 
that time made up the sum total of a woman's 
education. Yet, in defiance of it, out of her 
clear, strong head and deep, loving heart, Abi- 
gail Adams wrote letters to her son, John 
Quincy Adams, which, with her example, made 
the strongest moral force in his education, and 
which will live in literature as long as any 
speech of her more liberally educated husband. 
It proves how much more powerfully is one 



CASTE IN SEX. — IN EDUCATION. 217 

human being individually than any statute of 
law which proscribes it or oppresses it ; that in 
all ages and conditions women have existed 
who, through sheer mental and spiritual force, 
have commanded wisdom and the reverence of 
men m the very face of the sneer, " You are 
only a woman." We need not go outside of our 
own race or language to learn in defiance of 
what ridicule and prejudice they did it. A few 
sentences from Swift's famous letter " To a 
Young Lady on her Marriage " will indicate to 
what stage the education of women had ad- 
vanced in the age of Queen Anne. He says : — 

" It is a little hard that not one gentleman's daugh- 
ter in a thousand should be brousfht to read or under- 
stand her own natural tongue, or to judge of the 
easiest books that are written in it ; as any one may 
find who can have the patience to hear them, when 
they are disposed to mangle a play or novel, where 
the least word out of the common road is sure to dis- 
concert them. And it is no wonder, when they are 
not so much as taught to spell in their childhood, nor 
can ever attain to it in their whole lives. 

" I advise you, therefore, to read aloud more or 
less every day to your husband, if he will permit 
you, or to any other friend (but not a female one) 
who is able to set you right ; and as for spelling, you 
may compass it in time, by making collections from 
the books you read. 



218 OUTLINES. 

" I know very well that those who are commonly 
called learned women have lost all manner of credit 
by their impertinent talkativeness ; but there is an 
easy remedy for this, if you once consider that, after 
all the pains you may be at, you never can arrive in 
point of learning to the perfection of a school-hoy. 

" Your sex employ more thought and application 
to be fools than to be wise or useful. When I reflect 
on this, I cannot conceive you to be human creatures, 
but a certain sort of species hardly a degree above a 
monkey, who has more diverting tricks than any of 
you, is an animal less mischievous and expensive, 
might in time be a tolerable critic in velvet and bro- 
cade, and, for aught I know, would equally become 
them." 

History has not recorded how refined or sen- 
sitive by nature the English maiden was who 
received this letter from Dean Swift; but any 
woman of sensibility in the present day can 
easily decide how much such a letter would en- 
courage herself in the pursuit of learning. Only 
sixty years ago Sidney Smith wrote that there 
was no rational defense for the great disparity 
between the education of men and women in 
England. The advance is great ; yet to-day the 
sphit of Caste in Sex prevails in the education 
of women both in England and in America. 
Never till the human race outgrows it can simple 
justice be meted to woman in any life or work 



CASTE IN SEX. — IN EDUCATION 219 

that she attempts. Never till she commands 
her faculties and functions as man commands 
his can she be judged justly in love, in learn- 
ing, in labor, in creative art. Never till she has 
outgrown and outUved the caste of sex in herself 
can she command the high justice which all 
women long for and a few so loudly demand. She 
has yet to reahze — or, at least, to act as if she 
reahzed — that, whatever ideal of excellence a 
woman commands, she must command it as 
woman, not as man. Ever since the world was 
made, women have been abused for being 
women, till the brightest of them have come to 
despise their own sex, to apologize for it, to 
abuse it, or to try to be above it. For centu- 
ries a woman believed the highest compliment 
a man could pay her was to tell her that she 
was '' superior to her sex." If she was ambi- 
tious and wanted to do something great, she 
tried to do it like a man ; and, of course, made 
a miserable failure. To-day the most '' ad- 
vanced " women think it necessary to talk and 
act like men, as if there were any special honor 
in that ! A witty woman, anxious to impress a 
man with her wit, in nine cases out of ten falls 
to ridiculing her own sex, its weaknesses and 
foibles. The man may laugh, he may even 
admire her briUiancy, but by so much must she 



220 OUTLINES. 

sink in his esteem, if tie holds her to his own 
code of honor. If not too self-absorbed, she 
would notice that he offers her no antithesis 
in himself by ridicuhng his own sex. A man is 
proud of being a man. He has pride of sex ; he 
holds his own in honor. In nine cases out of 
ten a man is true to all other men. He will 
hide rather than expose the faults of men ; if 
he cannot justify them, at least, he covers them 
with silence. 

A woman, if not ashamed or sorry that she 
is a woman, is so imbued with the conviction 
that her sex is held in latent contempt that she 
deprecates or apologizes for it, if only to prove 
to the man with whom she converses that she is 
superior or indifferent to it, that by so much 
she personally may rise in his estimation. A 
race that does not believe in itseK can never 
rise above the level of slavery. A sex false 
to its own highest possibility, a sex not true 
to itself, mast accept degradation. A woman 
would despise a man who habitually ridiculed 
or sneered at men, at whatever work they did 
or attempted, however poorly done ; she would 
despise him as a man false to his own sex, to 
his own manhood. Is it any less false or des- 
picable for a woman to do the same thing? 
The unity of manhood makes half its grandeur. 



CASTE IN SEX. —IN EDUCATION 221 

The iinkindness or indifference of woman to 
woman makes half the weakness of womanhood. 
When women are as true to women as men are 
to men — when they hold their womanhood as 
men hold their manhood — as a glory, not a 
shame — then and not till then will they rise to 
the dignity of a united, concentrated, distinctive 
force in the universe. Not till then can the 
masculine and feminine soul reign in harmony. 
Then woman will be content and proud to 
reign as woman ; she will have no desire to 
rise above man, will see no special advantage 
in being like him. She will hold the equi- 
poise of the human race in abiding with him 
his equal counterpart, and her glory will be 
the glory of WOMAIN". That day is not yet. 
Caste of sex in education, with its root far back 
in the centuries, blossoms outside of all schools, 
and bears baleful fruit in millions of htiman 
homes. How often does a mother take her 
growing girl and boy and teach to each as only 
a mother can the mystery of the other's nature ? 
How often does she teach each to revere the 
attributes of the other, teach both that in the 
very difference of their nature and lot they are 
not to fear or despise, but to cherish and love 
each other. Instead, as a rule, the boy is 
simply left to take in prejudice and presump- 



222 OUTLINES. 

tion on the score of his sex from a thousand 
sources. How early the brother learns to lord 
it over his sister, simply because his parents 
allow him to do so. He robs her of her treas- 
ures ; he shuts her out from pleasure with the 
cry, " You sha'n't. You're a girl ! " He learns, 
from a thousand careless words uttered every 
day in his presence, that he is of greater account 
than his sister, because he is a boy ; that he can 
enjoy many things of which she is deprived, 
because he is a boy ; that great hopes are cen- 
tered in him, solely because he is a boy, and 
very few in his sister, because she is a girl. She 
may have the quicker intelligence ; but she is 
cut short in her studies because she is a girl. 
There may exist the same need that she should 
be taught self-help as he ; yet she is left to grow 
in helpless, untaught dej)endence, because she 
is a girl. She may have the same longing as 
he after free scope for her powers ; yet no less 
they are dwarfed and denied, because she is a 
girl. After such a process of education from 
infancy, is it strange that the brother grows up 
to believe that he is the superior being, not be- 
cause he has given any proof of it whatever, 
but solely because he is a man ? Or is it 
strange that the sister begins the life of woman- 
hood mentally maimed, crippled through all her 



CASTE IN SEX. — IN EDUCATION, 223 

nature, feeble and aimless, when for not one 
day of her existence has she been allowed to 
forget that she is a girl, and solely because a 
girl, proscribed in every sphere of development. 
A man's arrogance and tyranny seldom begins 
by his own fireside. It begins far back, when a 
little boy he played with his sister. Not na- 
ture, but his mother, with caste in sex, has 
made him what he is, and made his sister what 
she is. 

Not long ago a boy ten years of age burst 
into the room where I sat with his mother, and, 
throwing his books upon the table with great 
violence, his face flushed with passion, he ex- 
claimed, — 

" I'll never go inside of that schoolroom 
again." 

" What is the matter, Ernest ? " asked his 
mother. 

" They have given me a woman for a teach- 
er ; and I won't be taught by a woman." 

" Has she been unkind to you, Ernest ? " 

" No ; but she is a woman. All the boys in 
B. will laugh at me when they find out my 
teacher is a woman. I never had a woman for 
my teacher, and I never will." 

" Don't you know that some of the greatest 
men who have ever lived m the world were 



224 OUTLINES. 

taught by women when they were much older 
than you are, Ernest ? " I ventured to ask. 

" I don't care," exclaimed this young citizen 
of America. " / ain't agoin' to be ! Boo-hoo! 
boo-hoo !" 

'' There,,don't cry, Ernest," said his mother. 
" If you feel so bad about it, you needn't go 
any more. To-morrow I wiU look you up a 

new school. I'm sorry, though, for Mr. 's 

is one of the best in the city." 

Hearing this. Master Ernest wiped his eyes 
and his nose, seized his cap, and stamped forth 
in triumph, to tell the boy next door that Mb 
mother wouldn't send him to be taught by a 
woman ! 

The boy had passed one crisis in his life, to 
travel (spiritually) downward toward mean- 
ness and tyranny. Had his mother said : '' Er- 
nest, I have perfect confidence in Mr. 

and in the lady he has placed over you. You 
must go to your teacher," the boy would have 
learned two lessons — alas ! unlearned — which 
would have changed his entire character : first 
to obey his mother ; second, not to despise his 
teacher because she is a woman. 

Who can say that already in his heart the 
boy does not despise his mother; or that when, 
as a man, he shall despise her still more for 
being a woman, she will not deserve her fate ? 



XXI. 

WOMAN SUFFKAGE. 

Dr. Bushnell admits too much in his state- 
ment of the question in the first chapter of his 
book to be able afterward to maintain his ar- 
gument for hmitation and subjection with force 
or even dignity. Once allow, as Dr. Bushnell 
does, that women should be educated with men, 
that the training of universities, the opportu- 
nities of the learned professions should be open 
to them, and after that it would be utterly- 
useless for Dr. Bushnell or .any man to mark the 
exact boundary of progression to a human be- 
ing thus disciplined and educated. She alone 
could find the limit in the constitution of her 
own body and mind. When she had reached it 
she alone could know; no outside mind, though 
peering through the spectacles of a Doctor of 
Divinity, could inform her. Her capacity could 
be the only measure of her function. When he 
first became aware that men and women were 
being educated together in the colleges of Ober- 

15 



226 OUTLINES. 

lin and Antioch, Dr. Bushuell says : " I confess 
with some mortification that when the thing was 
fii'st done I was a little shocked even by the 
rumor of it. But when I drifted into Oberlin, 
,and spent a Sunday there, I had a new chapter 
opened that has cost me the loss of a consider- 
able cargo of wise opinions, all scattered never 
again to be gathered." All the danger and 
wrong now predicted as the most direful result 
of men and women participating in the right of 
suffrage, was more than foretold as the inevi- 
table result of their being educated in the same 
schools. Dr. Bushnell says : " Our new codes 
of training are even a surprise to us ; compel- 
ling us to rectify a great many foohsh prejudices 
that we supposed to be sanctioned as inevitable . 
wisdom by long ages of experiences." Well, 
Dr. Bushnell, if you live long enough, you will 
find yourself compelled to rectify some more 
very foolish and feeble prejudices which you 
have set down on your pages as the very essence 
of '^ inevitable wisdom." It is not likely that 
you are very much more '' shocked " on the verge 
of the '' Gulf of Female Suffrage " than you 
were twenty years ago over the prospect of wo- 
men and men going to school together. You de- 
clare now that no harm, but " beneficial results," 
have come from that. Suppose that you wait 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE. 227 

till "woman's suffrage " is tried, before you de- 
cide whether to work yourself into a very pain- 
ful state of "horror," or to bestow u23on the 
enfranchised sex your benign and smiling appro- 
bation. No harm has ever yet befallen the world 
through the open, honorable association of men 
and AYomen, either in education, church, or state ; 
but unutterable harm has come through their 
covert and hidden relations in every age of the 
world and in every sphere of Uf e. Woman in 
politics ! Woman has always been in politics. 
The question is not concerning the fact, but its 
relations. Shall woman remain forever in gov- 
ernment a covert, irresponsible, unacknowledged 
force ; or shall she be trained to high, respon- 
sible power — to be honored no less as woman^ 
wife, mother, and friend,, because she represents 
herself in the laws which concern her, her chil- 
dren, her property, no less than man ? How 
could Dr. Bushnell have proved more utterly 
the weakness- of his own argument than by 
taking refuge in* the proposition, that the princi- 
ple of human liberty as embodied in the Decla- 
ration of Independence is the " doctrine of the 
woods," a " scheme of free-thinkers and ' ma- 
lignants' like Rousseau and Voltaire." After 
informing us that he does this " for the purpose 
of taking down a little our egregious opinion of 



228 OUTLINES. 

the suffrage," and that it will come to its end 
and disa|)pear '^ within a comparatively short 
run of time," no one need wonder that he turns 
so lovingly to the Chinese, adding : " God for- 
bid that they ever be so far captivated by our 
dreadfully cheap way of suffrage as to give up 
their cadetship way of promotion for it ; a plan 
that has put the whole nation climbing upward, 
and will keep it climbing to the end of the 
world." And this from an evangelical clergy- 
man concerning a people who, with hundreds of 
thousands of authors and a literature reaching 
back past the siege of Troy and the days of 
Pericles, to-day, in the nineteenth century, mur- 
ders half of its female children at birth ; and 
who, with all its competitive examinations and 
intense scholarship, has not a school nor a book 
in all the land for the mothers of its people ! If 
the ideas of republican freedom are only '' catch- 
words of liberty ; " if the principles of the 
people's government, bought at such cost of life 
and treasure, are only " glittering generalities ; " 
if we are to go back to ohgarchy, or '' one man 
power," nothing more need be said either about 
manhood or womanhood suffrage. But we may 
^hank God that no wave of an ecclesiastical hand, 
nor stroke of florid pen, can blot out the princi- 
iples of human government, dearer to the Ameri- 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE. 229 

can people than life itself. It is only by deny- 
ing the principles of that government that Dr. 
Bushnell can escape their conclusions. Once 
admit man's natural right to suffrage as a hu- 
man being, and by no logical process can you 
deny it to woman. 

Dr. Bushnell takes vast credit to himself, and 
calls on all women to note that he puts his ipse 
dixit in a much pleasanter form, with less 
'' pounding emphasis," than the apostles. He 
adds : " Of course, Paul did not know every- 
thing, whether about women or on any other 
subject." After such a clerical admission, he 
cannot well call any woman " unorthodox " or 
"infidel," if she coincides. It is true that Dr. 
Bushnell on every page shows a disposition to 
put his lordly statements in the least disagree- 
able manner possible. His intention is to be 
verT/ generous ; but he is generous, patronizing, 
tender even, in an overshadowing, Olympic 
sort of fashion, that might be provoking if it 
were not ridiculous. Personally full of amia- 
ble feeling toward woman, he makes as many 
concessions to her demands as are possible with 
his unutterable man-conceit. The inexpressible 
sense of superiority which he feels as man to 
woman as woman, his delight in his own '' sway- 
force," so pervades and prevails over him that, 



230 OUTLINES. 

unconsciously, apparently, it makes him contra- 
dict his own abstract statements of the question 
on every page. Nothing could prove more 
clearly than his book that what he calls '' a re- 
form against Nature" is simply a reform — an 
irrepressible protest from woman against man's 
natural conceit, against his assumptions of supe- 
riority as man over her -as woman. Of course, 
this is nowhere more apparent than when Dr. 
Bushnell speaks of woman's ministrations in the 
Church. What a comment is it on the bigotry 
of his brethren to say that Ms conclusions are 
far in advance of most evangelical clergymen of 
our day. How many of them to-day are willing 
to give the largest interpretation to the words of 
St. Paul? Who are willing to acknowledge 
that many of the specific reasons, customs, and 
laws on which those words were based have long 
since passed away ; and that with them should 
have passed their restrictions also ? Only God 
can measure the narrowness, the littleness, the 
personal meanness, which has ruled in the 
Church under cover of the words of the great 
Apostle ! What has not woman given to the 
Christian Church ? She has lived for it, she 
has died for it. The idols of her heart, the cost- 
liest treasures of her fortune, she has conse- 
crated to it. Through all ages she has been, in 



J 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE. 231 

the largest measure, its brain and its soul. Yet 
to-night in how many Christian conference- 
meetings and prayer-meetings could she rise to 
tell in simple utterance "what the Lord has 
done for her soul," without being challenged 
and silenced by some sanctified masculine war- 
den of the tenets of St. Paul ? I can count the 
years on my hands since I heard a New England 
pastor's wife, a holy woman, who rose to speak 
a few words of personal experience in a Sab- 
bath-evening prayer-meeting, silenced by one of 
her husband's deacons. 

It is amazing to see with what a majestic 
sweep of the pen Dr. Bushnell disposes, in 
three or four pages, of the great female reigns 
of history. There is no argument here. The 
greatest facts of the past are all ignored. The 
reigji of the great Catherine of Russia, who in 
her passions and administrative talents equaled 
the most powerful man ; the reign of Maria The- 
resa, whose gallant Hungarians shouted " We 
will die for our king, Maria Theresa ; " the 
reigns of the princesses of France, who ruled in 
defiance of the Salic law, these and many others 
Dr. Bushnell does not mention at all. He 
could not, and yet prove that women-rulers 
have been failures. If history proves anything, 
it proves that women of one type have talent 



232 OUTLINES, 

for government, and have been among tlie most 
powerful rulers of the earth. But it suits Dr. 
Bushnell's purpose to declare that none of these 
sovereign women were great. Where they ap- 
proximated to greatness, it was only because 
they " reflected men ! " Elizabeth of England 
was not a great ruler, because she showed 
weaknesses as a woman. Judged by this stand- 
ard, which man ruler among all was ever great ? 
Do we find one, even among the most power- 
ful, who did not at some time betray personal 
littleness ? Then Frederic the Great was not a 
great king, because he was a literary pedant, 
and quarreled with Voltaire, and was shabby to 
his sister. Napoleon was not great, because he 
was devoured by envy, and was jealous of a 
woman's intellect all his life. Surely, he was 
not great when he so far forgot the gentleness 
of a gentleman as to push Madame De Stael 
behind him, that she might not enter a room 
before him. 

Dr. Bushnell discusses his question from be- 
ginning to end entirely in reference to a theo- 
retic man and woman. Most people carry an 
ideal man and woman in their head. And 
when the practical relations of the man and 
woman of every day are discussed with refer- 
ence only to these impossible ideals, we need 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE. ' 233 

not marvel at any ridiculous conclusion. Dr. 
Bushnell's '* woman " is a wondrous compound 
of violet and mignonnette, of angelic and of im- 
becile qualities. In one chapter she abides in " a 
sphere of silence ; " in another she is a husband- 
hunter of the leap-year sort ; in another she is 
" elected to gentleness and patience," or '' to the 
dreadful lot of violence and tyrant cruelty ; " 
in every one she is an abject " subject." His 
" man " roars loosely through every page of the 
book. " Thunder " is a pet word with Dr. 
Bushnell. He would make us believe that at 
least every other man we meet is a Jupiter, 
emitting thunderbolts at every breath. He 
says . ''It is the heavy tread, the thundering 
guttural voice^ the Jupiter-like air and expression 
(and mayi is not to blame for these^^^^ [no, poor 
fellow] that pass the law of female subordina- 
tion. Then he gently asks his feminine com- 
pound of botanical and seraphic properties, 
" why she should wish to encroach upon this 
man's thunder-force ? " Heaven forbid ! What 
woman would not gladly perform a painful pil- 
grimage, if so she could but find her Jove, and 
then fall down and worship him ! Alas ! the 
actual Jupiters are very scarce. Somehow the 
average man has missed the godlike proportion 
both in mind and stature. Very often he is 



234 OUTLINES. 

little more than a bundle of unreasoning preju- 
dices, opinions, and passions ; arrogating to him- 
self utter supremacy simply through the fact 
of being a man, not from any mental or moral 
height which he has reached as an individual 
soul. Yet no less '' this masculine half-being 
must be allowed to sink into the bigger self 
that he calls home, and be sheltered in the 
womanly peace." He finds it very pleasant, yet 
not more pleasant than the " womanly peace " 
finds it to shelter and to love him. Few are 
the women who would not choose to take this 
*' half-being," disagreeable as he sometimes 
finds it possible to make himself, and abide 
in his protection as does he in her ministration. 
It is not possible. No amount of fine theo- 
rizing annuls the fact that tens of thousands 
of women must shape their own fortunes and 
take care of themselves. In England, in 1861, 
840,000 married women supported themselves 
and their children by their own labor. This is 
a hard fact to set against Dr. Bushnell's rem- 
edy of universal marriages, to be accomplished 
through the workings of a gigantic matrimonial 
intelligence office, and a perpetual leap-year 
privilege accorded to woman to propose mar- 
riage to men. If anything could astonish one in 
Dr. Bushnell's book, it vfo^ld be that so wise a 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE, 235 

man could be so foolish. Which would be the 
more unwomanly in woman, to represent her^ 
self as a human being and citizen, or to so far 
outrage the finest instincts of her womanhood as 
to offer herself, by indirect act or avowed word, 
to a man who had never sought her ? What 
more degrades woman to-day than that she so 
often seeks marriage as a support? Why is 
the holy sacrament of love, the sanctity of the 
family state, so often prostituted and destroyed, 
but because marriage is entered upon as a neces- 
sity or a convenience ? And what can so place 
marriage on its only true basis of mutual love, 
mutual fitness, mutual esteem, as for woman to 
make herself independent of it as a mere means 
of subsistence ? 

If woman was in fact the " subject " creat- 
ure which Dr. Bushnell describes, she would 
not demand for herseK and her children what 
she demands to-day. After so many centuries 
of travail, it would be a sad conclusion to come 
to, that the human family had not struggled 
upward to a higher and completer development. 
Such development could not come to one half 
of the human race alone. Amid all tlie blind 
groping of women toward something brighter 
and better, amid all the mistakes and extrava- 
gances which they commit, the fact that woman 



236 OUTLINES. 

as woman demands for herself the complete 
right to herself, to the use of all her faculties as 
a human being, is the most hopeful promise of 
the time for the future of the whole human 
family. Man for so many ages- has told her 
what to do, what not to do, what she was capa- 
ble of doing and being, what she was not capa- 
ble of doing or being, that to hear her declare 
for' herself what she can do, what she has a 
right to do, what in God's good time she will 
do, is an invasion on precedent which he does 
not excuse or pardon. All his instincts and 
prejudices are armed against such innoyation. 
For this reason every magazme and newspaper 
that we take up bristles with his deprecations, 
his warnings, his sneers, his injunctions, and his 
old, old story of what woman is and what she 
is not. Just here lies the lesson which the men 
of this age must learn. It is the core of the 
whole " Woman Question.'' The time has 
come for woman to decide for herseK what she 
is and what she is not, to prove by opportimity 
what she can do and what she cannot do. 
Every human being carries the limitations of its 
action in its own constitution. It holds in its 
own consciousness the indice of its special, indi- 
vidual work. No outside soul can decide what 
that work is, — what its limitations are. No 



WOMAN SUFFRAGE. 237 

woman could completely represent a man. No 
man can represent a woman. He lias tried to 
do it for centuries, and the result proves his 
utter incapacity. His very difference from her 
makes it impossible. The hour has come for 
woman to represent herself. Heretofore man has 
shut against her the gates of advancement and 
of culture open to himself. He has oppressed 
her with unequal laws, and then told her she 
was his inferior. Heretofore she has been meas- 
ured and judged without half a chance as a 
human being. Hereafter she is to be measured 
and judged by her chance. Hereafter her de- 
velopment must be measured by the limits of 
her physical and mental constitution. How far 
those limits disqualify her for any employment 
or place can only be proved by free competi- 
tion. It remains yet to be proved what those 
limits are. There may be a few mistaken 
women, who imagine that some height is to be 
gained by women seeking to be as men. Un- 
derlying this excrescence is the vast underlying 
need already voiced into a universal cry — the 
woman's need of free development, growth, op- 
portunity, as woman. Harmony of organiza- 
tion, perfection of function, subtle fineness of 
brain-fibre, earnestness of soul, devotion of 
heart, spirituality untrammeledy must ever be 



238 OUTLINES, 

the best feminine forces which she can bring to 
the Avorld's service. No thoughtful, far-seeing 
woman, however she may admit the justice of 
equal suffrage, believes for one moment that 
she can find her highest enfranchisement in the 
casting of the ballot. 



XXII. 

"UNA AND HER PAUPERS." 

" Una and her paupers " is the designation 
given by Florence Nightingale to her whose 
name I once more lift up for the sake of other 
women, especially for that of my own country- 
women. Says Florence Nightingale of her : — 

" One woman has died — a woman attractive, and 
rich, and young, and witty ; yet a veiled and silent 
woman, distinguished by no other genius but the 
divine genius, working hard to train herself, in order 
to train others to walk in the footsteps of Him who 
went about doing good. 

" She died, as she lived, at her post in one of the 
largest workhouse infirmaries in this kingdom, the 
first in which trained nursing has been introduced. 
She is the pioneer of workhouse nursing. I do not 
give her name ; were she alive, she would beg me 
not. Of all human beings I have ever known, she 
was (I was about to say) the most free from the 
desire of the praise of men. But I cannot say the 
most free, for she was perfectly free. I will therefore 
call her Una, if you please ; for, when her whole life 
and image rise before me, so far from thinking the 
story of Una and her lion a myth, I say here is Una 



240 OUTLINES. 

in real flesh and blood — Una and her paupers, more 
untamable than lions." " She lived the life and died 
the death of the saints and martyrs, though the 
greatest sinner would not have been more surprised 
than she to have heard this said of herself. In less 
than three years she had reduced one of the most dis- 
orderly hospital populations in the world to some- 
thing like Christian discipline, such as the police them- 
selves wondered at. She had led to be of one mind 
and heart with her upward of fifty nurses and pro- 
bationers. She had converted a vestry to the convic- 
tion of the economy as well as the humanity of nurs- 
ing pauper sick by trained nurses. She had converted 
the poor-law board, a body not usually given to much 
enthusiasm about Unas and paupers. She had dis- 
armed all opposition, all sectarian zealotism ; so that 
Roman Catholic and Unitarian, High Church and Low 
Church, rose up and called her blessed. All, of all 
shades of religious creed, seemed to have merged their 
differences in her, seeing in her the one true essential 
thing^ compared with which they acknowledged their 
differences to be as nothing. 

" In less than three years — the time generally 
given to the ministry of that Saviour whom she so 
earnestly strove closely to follow — she did all this. 
She had the gracefulness, the wit, the unfailing cheer- 
fulness — qualities so remarkable, but so much over- 
looked in our Saviour's life. She had the absence of 
all asceticism or mortification which characterized His 
work, and any real work in the present day, as in his 
day. 



" UNA AND HER PAUPERS." 241 

^' All last winter she had under her charge above 
50 nurses, above 150 pauper scourers, from 1,290 to 
1,350 patients, being from two to three hundred more 
than the number of beds. All these she had to pro- 
vide and arrange for, often receiving an influx of 
patients without a moment's warning. Among them 
were prostitutes, worn-out thieves, worn-out drunk- 
ards. No small portioji of her work was to see that 
the dissolute and desperate did not corrupt the young 

and not hopelessly fallen How did she do it all ? 

She did it simply by the manifestation of the life that 
was within her, the trained, well-ordered life of doing 
her Father's business, so different from the governing, 
the ordering about, the driving prmciple. Every- 
body recognized it — the paupers, the vestry, tfie 
nurses, the poor-law board. The nurses would have 
died for her, because they always felt that she cared 
for them — for each one in herself — solely for their 
well-being. Because she had no care of praise in her, 
she had a greater power of carrying her followers 
with her than any woman or man I ever knew 

"We hear much of idle hands and unsatisfied 
hearts. All England is ringing with the cry for 
'Woman's Work,' and 'Woman's Mission.' Why 
are there so few to do the work ? If any one would 
know what are the lowest depths of human vice and 
misery, would see the festering mass of decay of living 
human bodies and human souls, and then would try 
what one loving soul, filled with the spirit of her God, 
can do to let in the light of God into this hideous 
16 



242 OUTLINES. 

well, let her study the ways and follow in the steps of 
this one young, frail woman, who died to show us the 
way, blessed in her death as in her life." 

" Dear Agnes " she was called by high and 
low, rich and poor. One who knew her always 
wi'ites of her : — 

" There are many who can look back upon her 
from the time when, in her own bright home, in the 
North of Ireland, she gave her days to tend the poor, 
where her visit was looked for as a ray of light 
beaming on body and soul. From those walks which 
would have annihilated most young ladies she would 
return, often amid drenching rains, as fresh as a rose 
to the social evening circle, ever devoted to the 
service and pleasure of all around her. 

" We love to remember her in her home at Fahan, 
by the side of Lough S willy, or among the glorious 
rocks of Port Rush, or as she guided us over the 
wide sea-floors of the Giant's Causeway ; but we 
knew her better, and the memories of her are dearer, 
as in after days she threaded the close courts and al- 
leys of the back streets of our great city, when she 
took voluntary share in the toils and cares and joys 
of our London Bible Mission." 

Yet of this young how^e missionary her sister, 
who writes her menforials, says : '' Of her it 
might indeed be said, whatever her hand found 
to do she did it with her might. She saw — 



''UNA AND HER PAUPERS:' 243 

what many, alas ! of the good and useful people 
of the present day fail to see — that God may 
be obeyed and glorified as truly in the, small 
details of domestic life as in the greatest mis- 
sionary work abroad." 

Such a Hfe as this bears me back to the deep, 
sweet fountains of womanly character which fed 
my childhood — to such women as Susannah 
Wesley, Mary Fletcher, Madame Guion, Cather- 
ine Adorna, Ann and Sarah Judson, and Mar- 
garet Prior, of New York. In this loud, egotis- 
tical day it comes with a touch oi healing. It 
is a benediction in the air, hushing discord into 
peace. Listening to its lesson, in the presence 
of God's poor and sick, one must maryel that so 
many women of means, of leisure, who fill the 
world with their outcry for '' opportunity" and 
work, who rebel against the meagreness and lit- 
tleness of their pursuits, do not see how broad are 
the fields, how wonderful the harvest of bodies 
and of souls, waiting, wasting for woman's touch 
of mercy. I would not be understood as urg- 
ing romantic, enthusiastic, untaught women into 
any mode of hfe for which they are constitu- 
tionally unfitted. But I wish it were in my 
power (though I doubt if it is) to say one word 
to make more desirable to the mass of dissatis- 
fied, unoccupied, affluent women the education 



244 OUTLINES, 

which would fit them for, in varied phases, a 
life of benevolent labor. There is no more 
painful sign of the times than the restlessness, 
the dissatisfaction, the lamenting, and yet the 
idleness of this class. Women who must work 
for their living are saved a thousand horrors 
which beset Fortune's (nominally) more fa- 
vored children. " I envy you because you are 
so 61Y.SJ/," said one. '' Oh ! if I only had some- 
thing of importance to do^ to make me forget 
little, miserable annoyances." Does that lovely, 
unhappy woman see an " importance " worth 
the seeking in the life of Sister Agnes ? It was 
not an easy life. Oh ! no. Is that why so few 
comparatively seek it ? Its rewards never take 
the sound of public applause. Is that why 
Florence Nightingale must cry : '' Oh ! daugh- 
ters of God, are there so few to answer? " A 
growing passion for publicity is fast becoming 
the bane of American women. They scarcely 
realize it ; yet it is becoming a prevailing fact 
that no vocation seems to them to be worth 
their seeking unless they think that in some 
way it mil recompense them with applause or 
'' fame." What a pitiful mistake ! I say this in 
no way underrating the gift of utterance, the 
power to embody in color or form any work 
of imperishable genius. I am glad for every 



" UNA AND HER PAUPERS^ 245 

woman who does well, be it on stage, or forum. 
God never endows a creature with any gift 
without his purpose — beyond man's finding 
out. Yet no less the mass of women, aye, and 
of men, must perform their life-work in silence. 
They must do their work, whatever that work 
may be, and find reward simply in its doing. 
God is just. Woman has come to her day. 
The feminine soul will take its half of the uni- 
verse. Yet no less the women who thrill our 
hearts, before whose very memory we bow in 
reverence, have done their highest work uncon- 
sciously. " They builded better than they knew." 
Do you ask which of all is the happiest life ? 
Then I say, from my heart, a consecrated one. 
Be it ''in the world " (so called) or out of it, 
in highway or by-way, as God wills, still a life 
consecrated to a service better, higher, sweeter 
than that of selfrcnjoyment or self -success. 
We all want to be happy. We all seek per- 
sonal joy as an instinct. Surely, God meant 
it to be thus when He made us. Yet no less 
He has set the deepest sources of joy outside 
of self-indulgence — in love, obedience, devo- 
tion, and duty. It may be a hard word, the 
last; it has a chilly sound. Yet no less it 
claims and possesses us more and more as our 



246 OUTLINES. 

days go on. Impulse, desire, idolatry, aggres- 
sive selfhood — one by one we lay them down. 
We drop our weights as we go upward. Lo ! 
the cross that we called Duty changes to our 
crown. 



XXIII. 

LET US LIVE. 

I OPEliT my window upon the world just 
wakened, and wonder if in any supreme mo- 
ment I was ever thankful enough for the great 
boon of existence. It is so wonderful to be alive ! 
It is so blessed to live. " Yes," said a friend 
to me once, "if we did not have to die ; but 
this world which you delight in so much — the 
trail of death is over it all." He had buried in 
the earth the delight of his eyes and tlie love 
of his life. Silence was my duty, standing 
within the shadow of that loss. Yet I do not 
delight in hfe because I am unacquainted with 
grief. I am pervaded with the consciousness of 
the impending mystery of death — the awful 
change to the one taken, the desolation to those 
left. I lift my weights and move on, often 
with an unsteady step. I see my friends falter 
and fall down beneath their crosses. Struggle, 
strife, treachery, disappointment, loss, anguish, 
hopelessness — the night-shade of huinan life — 
I do not forget it ; I cannot. The very shadow 



248 OUTLINES. 

that it casts — tlie long, long shadow, often 
stretching across nearly all the weary space 
from the cradle to the grave — makes me sure 
that to few, very few is human life the boon 
that it might be. I forgot nothing, not even 
inherited taint, moral, intellectual, spiritual ; 
the fate in temperament, which is the saddest 
curse ent&,iled upon perverted humanity. But, 
after weighing all in the balance, still I am 
sure that just to live, under ordinary conditions, 
is a privilege of which we but rarely make the 
most ; a possibility to whose highest limit we 
can but seldom rise. We find only at intervals 
the inevitable doom a drawback to our joy. 
Usually it is the care, the worry, the torment, 
which Should not have occurred at all. We 
have gone so far from Nature. Our lives are 
so artificial, so false, or so petty. Our great 
sorrows, like our great opportunities, stand far 
apart, lonely landmarks in our lives. And it is 
humiliating to sum up the meagre frets which 
make the discontent and unhappiness of aver- 
age dail}^ life. Your new dress fits miserably ; 
therefore, for the time being, you must be 
wholly miserable. John thumbs the walls and 
bangs the doors, and you grow overwrought 
and wretched. 
Your husband comes home at night silent, 



LET US LIVE. 249 

cold, or cross. All day you have been thinking 
what a dear fellow he is. He did a splendid 
deed yesterday, over which you fondly muse. 
Nobody on earth is quite so fine, or noble, or 
wholly to be adored as he. He opens the door. 
Lo ! your god is a moody man. Something has 
gone wrong — his digestion, very likely. He 
ate a piece of pie in a restaurant at noon vile 
enough to tear up mucous membrane and tem- 
per together. He is blind to all the little love 
surprises that you have lying in wait for him. 
He knocks down your bouquet, smashes your 
vase, bungles and bangs generally. In the 
keen reaction of disappointment, you answer 
him shortly or sharply. He in his turn says 
something which indicates that he does not 
think you altogether an angel. Either of you 
would die for the other. No less, each wonders 
for the moment how the other can be so dis- 
agreeable. What a perfect evening you had 
pictured to be spent together. You spend it 
apart. It ends in tears and suUenness. You 
dump your head on your pillow and wonder 
why you were born. 

You leave your work at night, thinking all 
the way home what a dear wife awaits you 
there. They are all present with you, a hun- 
dred graces and goodnesses of hers, of whom 



250 OUTLINES. 

nobody else dreams. You think of them, and 
how much she loves you, till you wonder in 
penitence how you could ever for a moment 
have been neglectful or unkind. '' Never, never 
will I be again," says the spontaneous heart as 
you open your door on your angel at an unlucky 
moment. She has just spanked Tom, and is 
still shaking Susan. Such a day ! Servants, 
children, markets, and shops all awry. She 
is a darling. Some other time she will make 
you sure of it, and beguile you with most 
delicious chatter and laughter ; but not now. 
She is wearied, worried, and irritable — over- 
worked, in fine. You could soothe her in a 
minute, if you would ; but you won't. You 
believe in the ancient tradition that " a wife 
should always meet her husband with a smile." 
She should always hide her troubles out of his 
sight. You remind her of this. You tell her 
that she is " unreasonable." She retorts bit- 
terly that she '' wishes you could be a woman 
for an hour." With a superior air, you inform 
her that you would not be a woman for a mo- 
ment, upon any consideration. You spend the 
evening away from home. Nevertheless, you 
find your pantaloons mended in the morning, 
and look upon them with a pricking of con- 
science, that would deepen could you see the 



LET US LIVE, 251 

sad tears that dropped into the stitches. You 
over-eat, or under-eat, or eat at the wrong time. 
Your headaches, your nerves are like needles, 
your words are disagreeable, even while the 
soul within you is yearning for perfection. 
Perhaps, like poor Eugenie de Guerin, you 
have a soul that " aflBlicts itself about the least 
thing. A word, a memory, a tone of voice, a 
sad expression, a nameless nothing, will often 
disturb the serenity of your spirit — small sky 
that the lightest cloud can tarnish." 

The processions of the seasons pass on. The 
constellations march through space. Days die 
in serenity and are born in splendor. The uni- 
verse lavishes its largess for your delight ; yet, 
of the infinite that it gives, how little you take 
in, how much less you assimilate. In what 
poverty you abide. What scanty measure you 
give out. 

In what perception, or faculty, or emotion do 
you rise to the supreme fullness of life ? You 
are haunted with the consciousness of what you 
miss, of what you have never reached. What 
dulls and deadens and irritates you this mo- 
ment ? Pickles and preserves, festering together 
in your stomach, very likely. Dyspepsia may 
be the penalty of long- violated laws. Or some 
discord of noises, or of souls, which you cannot 



262 OUTLINES, 

prevent. Something, a petty or mean little 
something, doubtless; yet it is mighty enough 
to undermine resolves, to defraud you of the 
highest and finest essence of Hfe ; more, to rob 
you of the possession of your highest and sweet- 
est self. Nor is the victim scarcely ever wholly 
to blame. The most exquisite flavor of daily 
existence eludes us chiefly through the lack of 
a prevailing and pervading courtesy in our con- 
stant intercourse with each other ; through a 
careless lack of tender consideration for the 
temperamental differences and infirmities which 
exist in all. —, — is " foolish and has notions ; " 

that is reason sufficient why should be 

crossed, and bv so much in no wise considered. 
We dismiss the fact without study, without one 
atom of tender feeling, and treat the victim ac- 
cordingly. Think how many loudly-professing 
'< friends " you have who never fail to repeat 
a cutting, sarcastic, or even rude remark ; who 
just as rarely speak to you one kind or encour- 
aging word. It is a sad comment on human 
nature that the one who repeats an unchari- 
table speech is invariably considered sincere, 
while the person who ventures to repeat or ex- 
press a very kindly one is always open to the 
suspicion of flattery. 

This lack of courtesy, of sympathetic kind- 



LET US LIVE, 253 

ness in little things, is surely the bane of aver- 
age daily life. We see it, feel it, suffer from 
it everywhere. It is as culpably palpable in the 
highest council of the nation as it is in the 
humblest household. 

Yes, Swedenborg's doctrine is true. We in 
our lower state are infested with demons — the 
demons of selfishness, which hold us down from 
the fullness and perfectness of human existence. 
Yet the soul will not be defrauded altogether 
of its birthright. Sometimes it soars and takes 
possession of its high estate. Then you know 
what it is to be glad to live. In some clear 
dawn, in some still night, in some moment of 
rest, when you possess your soul in peace, you 
reahze it all — the bliss of being, the joy of 
breathing, the ministry of hght, of color, of odor, 
of sound, the ecstasy of inspiration, the presence 
of God. What is it not, the heart in you that 
loves and lifts its idol up into the light of 
supernal faith, where it abides transfigured, 
sanctified, and safe from sin ? What is it not, 
this yearning for knowledge, this hunger for 
the perfect, this reaching out toward the illim- 
itable, this capacity to love, to suffer, to re- 
nounce, to believe, to know, to aspire, and to 
strive upward toward the aspiration? All this 
may be shut in one weary frame, even under 



254 OUTLINES. 

a stove-pipe hat or a fashionable bonnet. Every 
breeze that stirs, every bird that sings, every 
flower that blooms, every moment, with its ut- 
most perfect possibility, — is my minister, a 
portion of the universal joy of life. Get thee 
behind me, world — the world of mean cares, 
of self-love, of petty strifes, of poor ambitions ! 
Give me that which is holy and eternal — the 
kind word, the unselfish deed, the care for 
others in Httle things, the charity that can 
suffer and yet be kind, the affection which, 
sweetening life and surviving death, is our only 
foretaste of Heaven. 



6 



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